


Seven Minutes in Heaven

by kalima



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Action/Adventure, Amnesia, BMWs, Bingo, F/M, Gen, Humor, Mystery, Plot, Sex like crazy, Stranded, fun fun fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:02:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalima/pseuds/kalima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Bagel in one hand, car keys in the other, squirming baby dangling under his arm, Dr John Somebody – former professor of physics at the University of Something – ushered his other two children toward the non-descript beige BMW in the driveway of the non-descript beige house in the non-descript cul-de-sac of an upscale housing development. </i>  </p><p>This is not his beautiful house, this is not his beautiful wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Minutes in Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> This work is complete and now archived for posterity.

5:51 A.M.

"John? _John_. How can you sleep through that? It’s right next to your ear." 

The words, half-whispered, gruff with sleep, were followed by warm flesh, an arm sliding over the expanse of his back and shoulders. Fingers fumbled with the alarm on the bedside table – on _his_ side of the bed apparently. The annoying honk-buzz next to his ear stopped. The arm drew back across the landscape of his body.

He lay still, holding his breath. An ephemeral panic stirred in the lower chakras where sex and survival were linked. 

The woman rolled close again, gluing her naked front to his naked back. “Mmmm…” she said and then, “Mmmmmm…” Her smooth belly wriggled against his buttocks as she slipped her hand over his hip and down between his legs. He gasped, a mingled shiver of delight and terror. She giggled. “My, my, my! And a great good morning to you too, John!”

A memory tickled the edges of consciousness and then sank into the sensation of her pulling and stroking.

"We have seven minutes before the alarm goes off again," she murmured into his neck. "Wanna play beat-the-clock?"

Well, how could he refuse? Even if he lost, (which was very likely), he still won something. 

***

6:40 A.M.  
wake up and smell the---

"Goddamn it, John!" The covers were jerked back leaving his naked body exposed to the chill air. "Get up right now or I swear to God we will never have sex in the morning again! Not even on the weekends!" 

He bolted upright. "Yes! All right. I'm awake." 

The woman glared at him, her face shiny and ruddy hued from the steamy bathroom. She was dressed in a terry-cloth bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her head. 

"It’s almost seven,” she said, removing the towel and rubbing her short black hair with it. Her voice was clipped, brisk, sharp – all those descriptors that indicate displeasure. “You were supposed to be getting the children their breakfast while I was in the shower."

"Oh," he groaned, falling back onto the bed again, "not children too." 

"Just what is that supposed to mean?” 

“Aren’t we the sort of people who’d have an au pair lying about?”

The whining hum of a hair dryer started up and she shouted over the noise. “Josie’s not coming back. Were you even listening to me at dinner? There’s just you and me, so deal with it.” She appeared in the bathroom doorway, hair dryer like a fat gun aimed at her head. “I told you last night I had an early meeting with Bobby. You’ll have to drop the kids off at school. You should still have time to get a haircut before we meet with the board of directors.” 

His hand went automatically to his hair, because that was real, tactile, sweaty tufts he could dig his fingers into, and board-of-directors wasn't. He scratched his scalp and shuddered all over because it felt soooo good. Sure, maybe the hair was sticking out a bit, but whose hair didn’t look all tufty when they first woke up? Plus, the sex. That could mess the hair something awful. 

The sound of the hair dryer cut out. Abrupt silence rang in his ears – briefly. “You’re not at University anymore, John.” He heard cabinet doors opening and closing. “Eccentricity doesn’t play as well here. We’ve got people with actual money coming round today. You need a haircut. And please, please—“ She appeared in the doorway to stress the importance of her request— “wear the blue suit with a _plain_ tie. And don’t wear the Converse sneakers. They’re falling apart. The last thing we need is you showing up all Nutty Professor again.“

He draped his arm completely over his eyes. The Nutty Professor had Jerry Lewis in it, right? Quintessential nerd in glasses, drinks formula, turns into a smooth operator in a shiny suit who smokes menthol cigarettes, plays jazzy piano, and pulls the girls like crazy. 

Or wait? Maybe it was that Eddie Murphy fellow. 

One thing was certain: as sexual fantasies went this one was stunningly mundane. 

"Look,” he began, his voice sounding as lazy as the rest of him felt. “The sex was lovely. I’m perfectly happy to give _that_ another go. But all this domestic filler seems utterly superfluous. I mean, what’s the point of it, really?” 

There followed such a long silence that he ventured a glance from beneath his arm, hoping the woman had disappeared, along with the trappings.

She hadn’t. Same position. Different expression. She looked as if he’d really hurt her feelings, and that, in turn, had made her quite angry. She sucked in a breath full of bitter tears as yet unshed, and came into the bedroom discarding her robe onto the end of the bed where his feet stuck out from the disarray of sheets and blankets. He wriggled his toes beneath the terrycloth of her bathrobe. The cloth was warm from her flesh and she was just… naked there, naked as if he’d seen her in varying degrees of nakedness for years. 

At the bureau she jerked open a drawer. “Well, well, well. Looks as if Professor Johnny is back in fine form. Same self-absorbed son of a bitch you were before the accident.”

He watched her step into her knickers, adjust her breasts into the cups of her brassiere. Tense movements that made her flesh jiggle. Vaguely erotic thoughts meandered through his brain like Cybermen on a Sunday drive. 

Up onto one elbow, the most he could manage being so terribly relaxed and all, he said, “Sorry. No offense. You’ve been super, really. Honestly, I meant what I said. It was great. Best ever. Probably. I mean, thanks, really, really, can’t thank you enough. Mission accomplished, congratulations on a job well done, jolly good work, don’t even need the massage. Now feel free to pop out of existence so I can catch a few more winks before returning to the many and varied intrigues I’m undoubtedly up to my neck in somewhere, some—” _Cybermen? Where the hell had that come from—_ “time. Wait. What accident was this then?”

The woman drew in a little breath. Alarm, he thought. Then she went very still. 

"Oh my God," she whispered, black eyes glistening. "You didn't take your meds last night, did you?"

"My what?" 

She ran back to the bathroom and returned to the bedside with a glass of water, a pill bottle, and a look of deep concern. "Honey, you _have_ to take the medication every night. You can’t skip a night. Not ever." 

Something about her use of the endearment “honey” strained credulity but he couldn’t quite put a finger on what about it seemed off. She handed him the glass of water, and shook two oblong pills into his palm. Her eyes were compelling and he found it difficult to look away. 

“The doctor said that if you don't take your medication every night you could have a serious relapse.”

“Wait,” he said again. He could feel the pressure of it in his mind – a bubble of sound just behind his eardrum. 

“Please sweetheart, please just take the pills.” Her hand folded around his, trapping the pills in a cage of fingers.

“What sort of accident was it?”

“Pills first, then we’ll talk, all right?” Her tight mouth had softened, but worry still pinched at the corners of her eyes – and the something else. 

“What are they? What kind of—?”

“Sshh.” She stroked his hair back from his forehead and urged his hand up to his lips. “Doctor’s orders.” 

His lips parted. “But _I’m_ the Doc—“ and in went the pills.

“Swallow.” Two gulps of water and the fat lumps slipped down his throat. 

She smiled. “Now you’ll be all right.”

He blinked at her – black hair, black eyes, black bra, black knickers – stripes against the luminous pallor of her flesh. 

And there it was again. The _something else_ , the tickle, the itch. Just… there. It was excruciating. Oh, oh, _ow_.

It took only moments for him to feel the effects of the pills, far too short a time for any drug taken orally to metabolize. But by the time he realized that fact the part of his mind that could think it had crawled under metaphysical covers and gone back to sleep.

7:57 A.M.

Bagel in one hand, car keys in the other, squirming baby dangling under his arm, Dr John Somebody – former professor of physics at the University of Something – ushered his other two children toward the non-descript beige BMW in the driveway of the non-descript beige house in the non-descript cul-de-sac of an upscale housing development. 

“I want to ride in front!”

“It’s my turn! Daddy said I could ride in front this time—“

Holding the bagel between his teeth, he opened the back door, and gestured for the two girls to climb in. There were safety seats in three sizes with all the belts and mechanisms required for the purpose of restraining children. For their safety. But they had to get into the car first and neither child had moved to do so. 

The oldest of the three children eyed the back of the car, and then leaned a little to gaze into the front with all its luxury -- heated bucket seats in rich buttery leather that also swiveled. The swivel factor must have decided her course, because she gave the smaller girl a mighty shove to force her into the back seat. The smaller girl tried to turn away at the last second and banged her head on the car door. A beat, and then the wailing commenced with the startled baby joining in.

John opened his mouth and the bagel fell out onto the gravel, cream-cheese side down, naturally. He glared at the oldest child, whose eyes darted away guiltily even as her chin jutted out in defiance. 

“It was an accident,” she stubbornly insisted.

“It was no such thing.”

Shifting the sobbing baby to his hip, he bent down and pushed back soft, dark curls to examine the littler girl’s forehead. Her name was right on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t quite latch onto it. The effects of the medication he supposed. He probably shouldn’t be driving, let alone driving a car full of children. The thought made him giggle. 

“It’s not funny, Daddy!” the little girl cried. “She pushed me.”

“I know.”

“Is it bleeding?” she whispered, eyes still swimming with the impossibly huge tears of childhood. 

“Not a bit. Just a little bump on the noggin.” 

“Kiss it better.”

He bussed her forehead. “There. All better. In you go now.” 

He turned to the older girl. Something in both her belligerence and her insecurity suggested a name immediately. “Get in the car, Tegan.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and glowered. “It’s my turn to ride in front. You promised.”

“I’m sure I never did, or if I did I was wrong. It isn’t considered safe for children to ride in the front seats of cars anymore your mother tells me. So in you go like the good girl you want to be for Daddy.” 

She took a purposeful step back. The baby had stopped wailing, but now began arching its back powerfully in an effort to squirm out of his grasp. “Tegan don’t start with me. I’ll spank you. Don’t think I won’t.” 

Her look of disdain told him what she thought of that threat. 

“Fine!” he said, plopping the baby into the infant seat and securing the restraints. “Do as you please. I’ve locked up the house though, so you’ll be stuck outside until Mummy and I get home tonight. That’s hours and hours from now.”

She clutched the Pokemon lunchbox tightly. “I can take care of myself.”

“We’ll see. Have a wonderful day.”

He reached over to belt the younger girl into the safety chair next to the baby’s. So many slides and buckles and adjustments, how would he ever get them out of the damned things if they were in an accident? Bloody stupid piece of crap safety device—

The dark-haired girl was sucking her thumb, staring at him.  
 _Her name is Nessie. No. Periwinkle? Sarah-Jane?_

It wasn’t simply that he couldn’t remember her name. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there were others too whose names he couldn’t remember, other children he’d misplaced, left at the mall, lost at the park, down a well, he’d slept through their cries, he should be looking for them right this very minute—

“Daddy!” 

An insistent buzzing started up behind his eardrums like a sound trying to work its way out instead of in. His hands were shaking so hard the tab kept missing the locking mechanism. 

“What’s wrong, Daddy? Are you getting sick again?” 

The note of hysteria in the little girl’s voice poured ice over his panic. Suddenly, he felt calm, relaxed, and perfectly capable. He ruffled his daughter’s hair. 

“I’m fine.” He leaned in close for a stage whisper,

“Your sister gets me riled, though. We’ll just have to leave her here, won’t we? She can take care of herself after all.” This last he said in a voice loud enough for Tegan to hear. 

“Oh, all right!” Tegan groused. “I’ll sit in the back.”

 

8:53 A.M.

He took the girls to Seaside Academy, and they skipped through the double doors in their matching plaid skirts, waving him on his way. The infant was left at Happy Tots. It was in desperate need of changing, and he apologized for that, though he wasn’t sorry in the least he wouldn’t be the one doing it. He still had no idea whether the baby was a boy or a girl, and the name the child minder said when he handed it over into her care gave no clue. Ace, she called it. What kind of name was that? 

Back in his posh car that smelled vaguely of baby shit, he plugged his iPod into the radio, and trusted the shuffle to intuit his needs. He wanted fast, rollicking music, with an interesting beat.

“ _You gotta Fight for your Right to Paaarrrrtee!_ ” Not today. 

“ _This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful—_ “ Ah, wishful thinking. Guilt, guilt. Moving on.

“ _Paralyzed, paralyzed, I’m stuck in the middle and I’m paralyzed_ ” Yeah, OK, feeling trapped, got it. 

“ _Baby, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grey._ ” Shame that such a beautiful song would forever be associated in his mind with penguins.

The Stone Roses? Nah. Grateful Dead? No thank you. Madame Butterfly! _Hell_ no!

Hold on. “ _Twinkle twinkle little star, shining down on my blue car, drivin’ down the boulevard, she was soft and I was hard. Apache Rose gotta rockin’ peacock, hottest ass on the goddamned block—_ “ This made him twitchy and not in a good way. He re-shuffled. 

“ _You’re a fine one Timer, you got me walking through the gates of space—_ ” Was that Laura Nyro? Probably a metaphor for orgasm. Laura Nyro again, “ _—nothing cures like Time and Love_.” 

“ _Time after time..._ ” No! “ _If I could save time in a bottle…_ ” Stop it! “ _Funny how the time slips away—_ ” Gah! No, no, no. 

He was starting to panic in earnest now, hearts beating out of sync, and then suddenly Sting was singing Synchronicity and that was worse because he remembered, very distinctly, him and Carl Jung, two elderly gentlemen talking choice and chance in a coffee house. He’d looked in the mirror that very morning, knew he couldn’t be more than thirty-five, a handsome fellow who seemed capable of charming even himself, and yet he _remembered_ it, the soft plash of rain outside, the air close and warm inside, the steamy windows, his coffee exactly sweet enough, and Jung saying, “But my dear Doctor, that itch you can’t scratch? It’s not _all_ in your head,” and by the time he saw the people in the middle of the road waving him down, he was so disoriented and startled, he hit the brakes hard and lost control of the car.

***  
The BMW spun, tires slipping sideways in the gravel as the rear bumper hit the guardrail. Rose watched the car slide along the metal forever before doing another lazy forty-five degree turn and coming to a slow stop facing the opposite direction on what was, in California, the entirely wrong side of the road. The driver’s side of the car was covered with dust, though not a scratch on it, but the alarm was going off, and it looked like the airbag had swallowed him whole. 

Jack Harkness was halfway to the car before she could get her feet to move and then it was like she was running through water, her mother’s screechy cries close on her heels. 

“Oh my God! Is he dead? Oh my God, we’ve killed him!”

“He’s not dead, Mum!” Oh god, oh god, he wasn’t, was he?

“Should’ve stood at the side of the road, just you and me, like I said. Two nice-lookin’ women, all stranded and helpless are more like to get a man to stop—“

“You can’t trust him to act like a man, Mum. He’s never gonna do things the way you expect. Haven’t you learned that by now?”

“Doctor!” Jack pounded on the side of the car “You OK? You OK, Doc? Shit! I can’t get the door open!” 

“He’s not moving. Doctor!”

“Maybe he’s in shock—“

“Won’t know until we get him out. That airbag should’ve deflated by now. Doctor! Come on, man, wake up!”

Suddenly, the airbag collapsed with a hiss. The Doctor pushed away from the steering wheel with its drape of limp vinyl, calmly undid the seat belt, thumbed the lock, and sent Jack dancing sideways as he threw open the door. For a moment he just stared at them, his glasses askew, before snatching them off his nose. He fiddled with something on the steering column and the alarm stopped. His alarm had only begun.

“Are you lot completely out of your minds? You could have got us all killed! That’s an eighty foot drop over the side there in case you didn’t know.” 

Rose released the breath she’d been holding. He was embarrassed and he was snarling about it. He was back! 

“I told ‘em we ought to stand at the side of the road and pretend to be hitchhiking, Doctor, just Rose and me, so’s not to look threatening-“

“I don’t look threatening,” Jack protested with a laugh. 

“We looked like a bunch of terrorists, whooping and waving our arms about!”

Jack made a sound like a cross between phhfft and ha. “Anyway, he would have stopped for me if I’d been all by my lonesome, right Doc?” He winked. The Doctor stared at him, either not getting it or getting it too well. He swung one leg out of the car and planted a foot on the gravel, did the same with the other one then just sat there on the edge of the seat. He was being very cautious. She’d expected him to be past the embarrassment by now and be bouncing into the group hug and grope. It worried her. With good reason ‘cause next thing she knew he went all pale and clammy and dropped his head between his knees. 

“He must’ve banged his head after all,” her mum said trying to muscle her way between Rose and Jack. Just because she was a mother she thought that gave her rights to mother people. Rose stuck her elbow out, effectively barring her way, and leaned down, but it was Jack got there first, reaching to push the hair away from the forehead in question. The Doctor jerked away from the touch, eyes bouncing from one to the other of them. 

“Am I supposed to know you people?” 

“Great.” Jack groaned, throwing up his hands. “Back to square one.”

“He doesn’t remember? _Again_?”

“Maybe it’s just from the accident,” Rose suggested. The Doctor drew in a sharp breath, his expression suddenly guarded. 

“What do you know about that?” he asked.

“We… we just saw it happen.”

“No, that’s not—“ He shook his head then winced in pain. 

Jack was wearing motorcycle chaps over his jeans for who knew what reason, seeing as he'd never shown up on a motorcycle once during this whole fiasco. The leather creaked as he squatted down to peer into the Doctor’s eyes. “Are you in pain? Nauseous?” 

“What?”

“He means are you gonna sick-up.”

“Mum, he knows what nauseous means.”

“Well if he can’t remember yesterday—“ 

“I remember yesterday just fine!”

“Relax OK?” Jack said, “We’re here to help you. Honest. Are you dizzy? Feel faint? Blurred vision? Follow my finger. Good. Good. Ringing or buzzing in your ears?” 

The Doctor looked down at the road between his shoes. “No— well, yes, but that was earlier. Why? Are you a doctor?” 

Rose snorted. “He is today.” 

“Don’t see why you can’t get on with him like he was a real doctor,” Jackie declared. “Least he’s human and closer to your age.”

“Technically he hasn’t been born yet, _Mother_.”

The Doctor’s eyes tracked the conversation from face to face with bemused interest, but when his eyes met hers they slid away. She knew he didn’t remember, so it shouldn’t have hurt so much, but it did. He fixed his attention on Jack, suspicion written in every furrow in his brow. “Are you the doctor that says I have to take the pills every night?”

Jack smiled gently. “No sir. I’m the one who keeps telling you not to.”

***

“GPS shows his car stopped on Oceanview. Marker 138. That’s near the overlook at Hogshead. The airbag deployed.” 

“You think he’s hurt?” 

“I don’t know. He hasn’t called for assistance. Wait, I think we can — yeah, I’ve got a lock. Zooming in. Uh oh, looks like he’s got company.”

“Can you tell who it is?”

“Uh, there’s only the one vehicle. Looks like three, no four people. One of them is him, though.“

“Send a patrol car. Now. NOW.”

 

***

Jack had sent her mother to watch for cars at the top of the bend where the road disappeared behind a sheer cliff. The face of the cliff was covered with some kind of netting, the only thing holding back a few tons of loose rock. Rose shuddered. 

“I’ve been in an accident,” the Doctor was saying. 

“Yeah, but look, you’re OK.” Rose had her hand wrapped around his arm trying to assure him, trying not to shake him hard. 

“No. Not this one. Another one. It’s why I have to take medication. Only, I don’t like the way it makes me feel.” He ignored her hand on his arm, ignored her words, her face, her everything. “So you see,” he went on, looking at Jack, talking to Jack. “I’m in a rather vulnerable position here. You could be trying to convince me not to take something that I actually need to stay alive. And I might choose to be convinced simply because I don’t happen to like taking it.”

“They’re keeping you stupid. They’re using you, Doctor. We _know_ , because we’ve been telling you this everyday for the past three days.”

“We thought if we caught you earlier this time,” Rose said, “if you'd believed us, and hadn't taken them last night—“

“But I didn’t take them last night.” 

“Then you should be—“

“I took them this morning,” he finished, looking miserable. “She tricked me with a game of beat-the-clock!” 

At the top of the road, Jackie was waving her arms back and forth. She started running back down, shouting, “There’s a car coming,” and for a second all Rose could think was, oh my god, that woman has _got_ to get herself a sports bra, until she heard the rest of the cry, “Looks like a copper!” 

“Well that’s our cue,” Jack said briskly. He grabbed Rose’s hand, pulling her after him, but she hadn’t let go of the Doctor’s arm yet and he was dragged to his feet stumbling in her wake. 

Rose twisted out of Jack’s grip. “Give me a sec!” She could see her mum tearing down the road, having trouble keeping up with her feet, and Jack was practically vibrating with the need to be gone. She snatched the Doctor’s hand, forced a matchbook into his palm and closed his fingers over it. “That’s where I am, yeah? Call me. _Find_ me. Jack’s keeping the—” 

From the corner of her eye she saw her mother stumble and fall, tumbling over and over. She heard herself scream. The Doctor turned, and for a moment – but no, even though he was closer he just stood there! Jack – quick Jack, nimble Jack – grabbed her mother up before she’d finished rolling. By the time the cruiser with its lights flashing came round the hairpin curve in the highway at Hogshead, they were long gone.

***  
“Where the hell have you been?”

He kept walking and she fell in step beside him, her high-heeled shoes making click-clack noises on the paving. Her skirt was tight across her hips, her jacket stretched tight across her chest, and she walked with an angry wriggle that amused and delighted him, though he thought it best not to let her know that.

“You made me look very bad, John. I had to make all sorts of excuses and they were bloody lame excuses. You nearly cost us our funding. And you didn’t even get a haircut!”

He took a deep breath then pushed his specs higher onto the bridge of his nose so he could look down it at her. “Well, I had to lease a car, file an accident report, and I think we may owe the state of California for repairs to a guard rail.”

“You were in an accident?”

“Another one. I’m very prone to them it seems.”

“Oh John, are you…?” she broke off, looking less concerned and more suspicious, “You’re alright, though?” 

“Yes, thanks for asking. The children weren’t with me. In case you wondered.”

Her mouth got tight. “I assume if they had been with you that’s the first thing you would have mentioned!”

"You may be right about that.” 

She blew out a breath of hot exasperation, and he really just wanted to be done with the conversation. “Look, it’s no big deal, as the natives say. I was… distracted. Took that turn near Hogshead too fast. But the good news is, I’m unharmed—“ He held out his arms, cocked his head at her with all the charm he could muster from his considerable arsenal, and then spun about once to show her how perfectly, wonderfully unharmed he was, “—and I think I just may have solved that little bump in the decryption problem.”

“Really? Oh, Johnny that’s—“

“Great? Thought you might be pleased, my love, my dearest, little… wife-person. So me to work now. Toodles.”

Mostly he was anxious to be alone with his matchbook.

***

 

At the restaurant over lunch, he found himself fondling the matchbook in his pocket, unable to leave it alone as he listened to Dexter go on about the project, trying to pin him down on the particulars, find out how close he was to being done. 

He said, “almost,” like he always said, and Dexter sighed, an explosive snort that disarranged the hair which he _hadn’t_ got cut. 

The project was called DeepTime, a pretentious name for something mind-numbingly simplistic. Everyone else seemed to think the work was cutting edge, but it was work he could do in his sleep. He practically shat the stuff out. Formulas. Equations. The fluid engineering of Time and Space in relative dimensions. And lately he’d been taking it slow anyway, drawing it out whilst giving the impression that he was now at a crucial point in the work and couldn’t be rushed. Mostly he did crossword puzzles and sudoku on the sly, sometimes played Scrabble with three computer-generated players all named Romana. The computer couldn’t be bothered to come up with a different name for each one. 

His wife, Sandy (whose name was actually Cassandra though he never called her that on account of some unpleasant association with the name that had left a bad taste in his mouth, and so he called his wife Sandy) had convinced him to take this job in the first place, because the money was too good to pass up, and the opportunity for renown as well, and… because it kept him from the temptations of academia, temptations of which and in which he was prone to indulge. Or so he was given to understand. Temptations like a girl’s name and room number on a motel matchbook. He took it out of his pocket, like it was just a matchbook and maybe he was going to light a cigarette, a menthol cigarette perhaps, but every public place in California was a non-smoking place and so he turned the matchbook over and over, instead, weaving it between his fingers. He was thinking hard on the matter of the girl’s wide, beautiful mouth. Looking at her had made him ache in the oddest places: behind his teeth, and under his fingernails— 

Dexter reached over and snatched the matchbook out of his hand. John started to make a grab for it then thought it would make it seem too important. 

Dexter read the name and the number. His thin lips all but disappeared. “What the fuck are you thinking?” He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Thought that was a given.”

“Don’t start this up again. Can’t you just keep your dick in your trousers, John, for once in your life?” 

“I have to take it out sometimes, Bobby. Needs air, and water, and sunshine like all growing things.”

“Don’t be glib. She was going to _leave_ you for Christ’s sake.”

“Who? Sandy?”

Dexter’s stared blankly at him at him. He looked like he was trying to catch a thought with his mouth. 

“You know,” John said, leaning across the table for emphasis, “Sandy, my wife?” 

The other man blinked a couple of times then looked down at his half-empty plate. “Yes. Who else?”

“Well, how should I know? Lost a good portion of my memories, haven’t I? I keep hearing what a bastard I was before, but I don’t feel like one, don't know why that should be the general consensus.” 

“She— Sandy was going to take the children and leave you for good, John. This girl—“ He looked at the name then squeezed the matchbook in his fist— “Rose was the last in a long line of many conquests before the accident.”

“Huh. Yeah… about this accident, what exactly—“

“Look. What happened to you was awful, tragic, but these are sometimes just the kind of wake up calls we need. Maybe the accident was the best thing that ever happened to you. You have beautiful kids, a beautiful wife—“

“There’s a song in that somewhere.”

“Nice house, nice car—“ 

“Car’s in the shop.”

“— _and_ important work for which you’re getting paid a princely sum I might add. Don’t sabotage the best opportunity you’ve had in a long time.” Dexter tossed the matchbook back across the table at him. “Throw this away, forget about her. She’s not worth your future.”

John held his gaze for a moment then nodded. 

He was very glad now that he'd rented a car without a GPS device. He suspected it was this very glee about how he couldn't be tracked on his way to see a pretty girl at a cheap motel that made him such a bastard in the first place.

***

“How much is this in real money again?” Jackie asked, waving a twenty at her.

Rose didn’t quite look up from the People Magazine she’d got at the 7-Eleven day before, even though she’d read everything in it twice. “I told you already,” she said between clenched teeth. “Just divide it in half and you’re close enough.”

“Ten pound? That all? Wonder how many books you can buy with it?” 

“You’re taking up reading now?”

“Oh, ha ha, riot you are. No. Bingo books. There’s a hall just down the road. All-Star Bingo. _All-Star_ and us in California!”

“Right, Mum, that’s where all the big film stars go to get their bingo on. You’re not going. You’d have to walk back in the dark.”

“Excuse me? Who’s the mother here? Anyway, I’ll catch a ride.”

“Mum…” Rose warned.

“A cab! I can call a bloody cab, can’t I?”

“Probably don’t even have cabs out here.”

“You’re telling me there aren’t cabs in the whole of California.”

“I don’t know! God. Look in the phone book, why don’t you?”

“Don’t get snappish with me.”

Rose folded herself over the saggy mattress, and buried a scream in the magazine. 

“You need to relax, sweetheart. Been cooped up in this room every night for a week now. Why don’t you come with me? Do you a world of good.” 

“You know I can’t. I have to be here.”

“In case _he_ shows up?”

“Yes. In case HE shows up. Anyway, Jack said we should lay low for a couple of days.” 

“Well that’s his problem, innit? I mean we’re the ones stuck here, washing our knickers out in the sink while he’s swanning about the universe in the lap of alien luxury. It’s not even his ship.” 

Privately, Rose suspected Jack’s concerns about laying low had nothing to do with the Doctor at all. He was being cagey about a lot of things, like where he was keeping the TARDIS hid, and why he couldn’t stick around for more than a few minutes at a time, and especially how they should never, _ever_ try to contact him because of “uh… stuff. Going on. Gotta go.” 

When the Doctor had first disappeared, the TARDIS had brought Rose home, parked itself at the foot of her bed and stayed there. She’d gone back in right away of course, because, hallo, disappeared Doctor _not_ in her bedroom! But it felt so strange inside the ship, so cold and strange, as if all the rooms that were empty of _him_ were now empty rooms inside _her_. An icy sweat broke her skin, tingling numb in her fingers and toes, her heart pounding hard enough to break her chest – not just the mother of all anxiety attacks either, but a shuddering, simmering rage from deep down inside, like there was an active volcano in her belly about to blow out the top of her head, and then—

Well, was a bit like that tornado in Wizard of Oz. Something definitely tornado-like swirled around the console, gathered fury and lifted her right off of the floor. It spun her about a few times before blowing her through the doors and onto her bed so hard she bounced twice and hit her head on the wall. After that she discovered the TARDIS had locked her out. Key wouldn’t work. Pounding was useless, kicking it likewise. 

Two days of frustrated efforts with borrowed tools and blow torch, two days of near hysteria, one bad _bad_ day of contemplating something she’d never contemplated before, and a week pointedly ignoring-the-big-blue-box-at-the-foot-of-her-bed later, she started searching the internet.

There were people out there interested in the Doctor’s doings on Earth – that much she knew all too well, so she began by posting to forums using key words only a special few would understand, leaving cryptic, coded messages on missing-person sites that had dedicated search engines. Being real clever she thought, ‘specially when she got an email from Sarah-Jane Smith saying she’d look into it. But when she sent a reply it was bounced back as undeliverable and minutes after that, Jack Harkness showed up and pointed out just what a “goddamned stupid thing to do,” she’d been doing. 

“So, what?” her mum was saying, “we’re stuck here twiddling our thumbs until Jumping Jack Flash pops back here and hands us money? Where’s he getting this money, anyway? And if he’s got it to burn, why aren’t we in a nice resort on the beach? They’ve got casinos there. Run by Indians wearing traditional native regalia.” That last was a direct quote from a brochure.

Rose raised her head and snarled, “If you’d done what I asked – stayed outside like I told you—“

“And have you running off to outer space with _another_ alien?”

“He’s not a—“ she broke off. Useless, bloody useless talking to the woman. She sat up, rolled her shoulders, shook out her arms, and took a few deep breaths, then pointed at the door. “Go. Play bingo.” 

Jackie gave her a look, then plopped her bottom onto the mattress, and nudged her shoulder. “Come _with_ me. Come on. Just you and me. Couple of girls out on the town? What’d’ya say?”

Rose loved her mother, really and truly, but— “Mum… _bingo_?”

“Suit yourself.” Jackie said, stiff upper lip quivering ever-so-slightly. Hurt feelings or no, she wasn’t the kind to let it stop _her_ having fun. She grabbed another twenty out of the drawer in the bedside table, paused to do the division in her head – loudly – and took two more for good measure. Money folded neat and tucked away into her bra, she eyed the taser nestled up close to the Gideon bible. She worried her lower lip. Rose said, “Go on then. Take it just in case.” 

“You think?”

“Best do. We’re in America. Everyone's got a gun.”

“What about you?” 

“I’m not the one going out.”

Jackie went into the bathroom to check her hair and add an extra coat of mascara. “Sweetheart?” she called, “I was just wondering. What if the Doctor shows up and he still doesn’t remember?” 

“Why would he come here if he didn’t?” 

Rose heard the heavy sigh, and it was the kind of sigh she hated, because it meant her mum was about to impart the wisdom of her vast experience. “Well, seems to me that’s a question you ought to know the answer to before you let him in.” She checked her pocket for the room key then opened the door. Late afternoon sunlight blazed into the room, and Rose raised an arm to shield her eyes. “You’ll turn into a mushroom,” Jackie said then added with a wink, “Don’t wait up.” And then Rose was alone with her magazine, and seventy-eight channels of cable television showing absolutely nothing she wanted to see.

***

“The mother’s gone off to play bingo. Want I should put someone on her?”

“That is, I believe, one of the reasons I’m paying you,” Dexter said. He flipped the phone closed then smiled at the woman standing before him, arms folded over her chest, looking terribly cross. “Shouldn’t you be at home,” he said, “with the two point fives, keeping dinner warm for the hubby?” 

“I have to pick them up from school first.” She shuddered delicately. “I hate those little things.”

“It’ll all be over soon. He’s nearly done. Oh, by the way...” He drew a breath through his teeth, a soft apologetic hiss. “Your name is Sandy now.”

She groaned. “Honestly, Bobby, I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I can’t tell which way is up with him anymore.”

“Really? Thought you had that bit figured out.”

“This isn’t funny. This morning he – when we were –“ She paused, took a deep breath. “I’m pretty sure he slowed the rotation of the planet.”

Dexter blinked. “Are you certain you weren’t just, you know, enjoying yourself?”

“It was _exhausting._ Went on forever. Every time I’d think, oh thank god, he’s nearly done, I’d sneak a look at the clock and not even a minute had gone by. I’m not built for that sort of thing. I’m not a bloody Sex-U-All!”

“Um… the clock was broken?” he suggested hopefully. She cocked a surly eye at him and he gulped. “Well. That just isn’t possible. He’s never been able to do that, has he, even at his...stretchy best?”

She gave a tense shrug. “You're the expert. Anyway, _after_ , that's when I find out he wasn’t even dosed. So what else could it mean? I swear he’s just screwing with us half the time as it is. And if that trashy girl gets to him, manages to convince him not to take our little magic pills, we’re screwed all the way. We lucked into this, and we can get lucked out of it, you know.” 

“But don’t you see? Everything in his ginormous brain is ours already. Just awaiting the last bit of decryption and an upload to our facilities. He’s doing all his other thinking with little brain now.” 

“Bobby. He slowed down _time_ for a fuck. I was there.” She about-faced on her high-heeled pumps, and headed for the door. “And, _by the way_ ,” she called back over her shoulder, “it’s not that little.” 

***

The Silver Seaside Motel: eighteen rooms, doors practically sitting on the tarmac with the occupant’s cars. The marquee proclaimed “Cable television! Mini-fridge! Singles, doubles, and king-sized suites! Ocean view!” Of course, you had to walk across a four-lane highway to see the ocean. 

John drove past the place, and turned onto a street so as to park out of view of the desk clerk. He was just dropping in on someone, after all. No need to arouse suspicion. As he cruised slowly down the street looking for a discreet spot, he passed a parked van with “Bug Man,” written on the side and cartoon picture of a fellow in top hat and tails holding a flyswatter. The Bug Man himself was sat behind the wheel, talking on his mobile – sadly, not wearing the top hat. 

The radio in his rented Ford Taurus – tuned to KRRK, 101.7, Your Classic Rock Station from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's – started blaring out the chorus of “Jumping Jack Flash.” He opened his mouth wide and laughed. Then starting singing.

***

Rose ended up watching a Spanish soap, dabbing at her eyes with a wad of loo paper. Not because she was moved to tears by gorgeous people accusing each other in Spanish, but because she didn’t understand a single word they were saying. Not a lick, ‘cept maybe a couple of the characters names, and the “Amor” in the title.  
t  
The TARDIS's gift of making all languages her language was, she'd learned, something the Doctor himself made possible. And as Jack was keeping the TARDIS well away, worried it might fall into the wrong hands, and the Doctor was not present and definitely not himself when he was, then there was nothing for it. 

Glad as she’d been to see Jack Harkness alive and well, she was a little concerned that the “wrong hands” Jack referred to belonged to people he knew. But what could she do about that? She was stuck here _waiting_. All she knew for sure at the moment, was that Raul, with his manly naked chest, had made Estralita fall at his feet weeping. 

She turned off the telly, rolled onto her side to hug a not very fluffy pillow. The realization that she might never again be fluent in Spanish whilst hearing all the words in English, brought the nature of her predicament home to roost. Being cut off, alone, bereft, stuck in Powell Estates (or its California equivalent) with nothing to look forward to for the rest of her life but Thursday night bingo with her mother – that was worth a tear or two. 

Worse, Rose knew exactly what her mum had been implying. That if the Doctor felt compelled to pursue her name and room number written on a matchbook, it would be for the usual reasons blokes went after girls. Mum could never quite get her mind around the idea that the Doctor was not like ordinary blokes. If he did show up, Rose was certain it would be because a) he was himself again or, b) knew she was significant, had lots of questions for her, and therefore very close to being himself again anyway. And she’d help him. ‘Cause that’s how they were with each other. 

The rap at the door made her jump even though she’d been hoping for it. Could be Jack. Could be the desk clerk. Could be someone she shouldn’t open the door for at all. Or it could be—  
Himhimhim. Yay!

She’d had to stand on her tiptoes to see through the peephole and now pressed her forehead to the door in a moment of silent thanks. She ran for the bathroom yelling over her shoulder, “Be right there!”

She splashed water on her blotchy face, pulled her not dry underwear from the towel bar, wadded them up, and stuffed them into the top drawer of the dresser as she went to open the door. Taking a deep, braless breath, and—

“Hey, you.” 

He’d removed his specs, and stood blinking at her uncertainly. The uncertain part gave her pause. “Is this a bad time?" he said. "I mean, if you’re busy I can— well, no, I won’t come back probably. I’ll have thought better of it by then.” 

Her heart sank a little. Not himself. All right. She could handle that. “I’m not busy.” _Understatement of the millennia_. “Come in.” She shut and locked the door behind him then leaned back against it. It was a solid door and her stomach was tumbling into an abyss. 

He hadn’t got very far into the room when his nose crinkled up. She could smell it too now, the mildew, the greasy waft of old McDonald’s wrappers in the bins, the burnt hair smell blowing out of the noisy air conditioner. Classy. 

“Would you like…? Oh never mind, haven’t got anything to offer. Unless my mother brings back a bottle.”

“Your mother? Oh. Right. That woman you were with. She’s staying here with you?”

“She’s gone out. Be a while.” She felt the heat rise in her cheeks. Oh god, why’d she say it so quick like that? His eyes swept over her, from head to bare toes and back up again. Gooseflesh pimpled her arms and legs. The lack of a bra was becoming a problem.

“Doctor,” she began. 

He held up a hand. “No. Before you start telling me all about myself, I need to ask a couple of questions.” 

She nodded quickly, not trusting her voice. 

He looked down at his shoes. “I need to know was I ever—? Did I ever…?" He took a deep breath and looked at her a little sheepish. "Can I play guitar?” She laughed. Couldn’t help it. He grinned. “Because I was listening to Hendrix in the car just now—“

“Hendrix?”

“Jimi Hendrix. He played guitar, overdosed in 1970, left a legacy. He was quite famous.  
A veritable god amongst guitarists.”

“Oh, right, him.”

“Right. Anyway, as I was listening I had the urge to do this—“ He kicked a leg out all of a sudden, pulling a squeak out of her, then lunged forward, his face screwed up in a grimace of guitar riff ecstasy. His left hand slid rapidly through the air over imaginary frets, his right hand— 

She gulped. His imaginary guitar was slung pretty low. She looked at the ceiling, the very ugly ceiling. 

“Erm… you seem to play air guitar pretty well.” She pushed herself away from the door, pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Maybe you can play the real thing. Dunno. You’re always surprising me with stuff you can do I never knew about ‘til you do it.” 

“Am I in love with you?” 

“What?” She blinked, vision swimming as he stepped closer. She could hear herself swallowing, a loud echo in her ears. Her back was still to the door and her nipples poked out, sudden and painful under the thin cotton of her cami. _It’s ‘cause of the air conditioner_ she wanted to shout, wanted to cover up, but there wasn’t enough space between him and her to cross her arms. "I'm sorry. What?" 

He wasn’t even looking at her nipples. He was looking at her mouth. 

“That’s my second question.” His voice was low and shivery, and she couldn’t seem move her gaze from his lips as they formed words. He was very close now, extremely close, they were practically on the other side of each other. He planted his palms flat on the door, on either side of her head. “Am I in love with you, Rose?” 

“Yes,” she blurted out. 

"Good," he said. His mouth was right there, hovering at the corner of her lips. “That makes me feel much, _much_ better about all this.” Then he kissed her.

There were words supposed to follow “yes” she was certain. A “but” in there somewhere, and a “wait” that got pushed aside by his tongue when his mouth glommed onto hers. A whole list of words she and Jack put together, hoping to trigger a snap back to reality if either of them got close enough to say any of them. Words that slipped away now, slid off her brain like undercooked spaghetti, skittered along her spine fleeing the heat of his hands as they wandered down the back of her shorts. Beneath which she had no underpants. 

This was not how she’d envisioned this meeting going at all. Really, it wasn’t. Not like she hadn’t thought about it other times. He flirted with her, but to be fair this Doctor flirted with everything. He flirted with peanut butter and washing machines. He was a firm believer in the power of flirtation. She’d accused him of being a tease once, and he pretended not to know what she meant. But now it was clear he knew _exactly_ what she meant. 

‘Cept, it wasn’t him, was it? She started to pull away. 

“I’ve missed you so much,” he murmured, there, in the whorl of her ear. All the little hairs on her body stood on end. And then she was threading herself around him, legs, arms, wayward nipples pressed tight to his chest.

“Me too," she said, "oh god, me too.” Her knees went all liquid. He was pulling her backwards, with him, to the bed. He was turning her round. Impelling her down onto the bed. Not even the bed she’d been using. Didn’t matter. Her knickers were in a drawer far, far away. It was destiny. And he was tugging at the knot in his tie. And he was pulling his shirt over his head ‘cause he couldn’t be bothered to unbutton it all the way. He was kicking off his shoes, undoing his trousers. 

“Wait,” he said. 

She struggled onto to her elbows, legs splayed, dangling over the side. Where’d that come from? 

“Hang on a sec." He reached into the pockets of trousers just barely suspended from his hipbones. If she brought her foot up and nudged a bit with her toe they’d fall right to the floor. She’d get a real good look then. But she made her eyes focus on his face because she wasn’t _that_ sure of herself, hadn’t seen enough to know what’s what in the range of male genitals, and didn’t want to do anything to kill the mood like scream or faint. What if it was covered with spikes or barbed like a tomcat’s? 

"I didn’t know what to get," he said, "so I thought, an assortment.” 

Condoms by the fistfuls fell onto the bed like the Skittles rainbow. 

“Trojans. Those are dependable, right? Oh, and these from Japan are supposed to be the best, that’s what the fellow at the shop told me. Or, let’s see? Mighty Man? Sadly, no. Vibra-ribbed? Huh. This one has little raised dots. Her Pleasure. Twisted Pleasure. Heat transss…mitting polyurethane. Ooh, strawberry!”

Rose let her head fall back on the bed with an exasperated sigh. How could she have ever thought this wasn't her Doctor? “You planning on doing yourself then?”

“It's not impossible. Pretty sure I have done. Oh. You mean tonight. No. You sure don’t want the strawberry?” He waved the packet at her hopefully. “Okay right. I think we’ll need…" Five condom packets were plucked from the scattered assortment-- "this many.” 

Rose could actually feel her eyes pop out of her skull. “Er…” She started scooting incrementally up the bed in an effort to escape the gleam in his eye. “I don’t think— I mean, you know, my-my mother, she won’t be gone forever. She’s just right down the road and-and if she loses all her money, well, then—” 

He swooped in, latched onto a nipple right through her shirt. She lost track of her thought for a second. His mouth broke contact with a noisy smack. “She’s going to win. I’m sure of it. She’ll be gone a long, long while.” He pondered that development a moment, and added another condom to the pile. “This one’s got Madonna on it.”

“You know, I’m not really sure this is going to work--"

He flung the packet aside. “Right. Who needs Madonna?” His grin was manic. “I mean, bloody hell. Look at you! You’re so _soft_ and squeezable and rosy just… _everywhere_ , and you’ve got that mouth and those—“ His hands did a circle dance of grabby in the vicinity of her tits. 

She wrapped her arms over them, and held up a warning hand. “Stop. Just stop. Right there. This is all going a bit fast for me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. I mean, you got it all planned down to how many times? Don’t recall being consulted on that. I don’t know we even need one, let alone five. And,” her chin went up, daring him to mock, “’S not very romantic is it?” 

His mouth fell open, and he fell back on his heels like a chastised puppy. Which is when she said, “eep,” or words to that effect. 

Yeah, there it was, poking out from the V of his open trousers, all… ready. Not the least ashamed of itself. Lushly proportioned. Nodding at her wisely. Possibly winking.

She swallowed hard, dragged her gaze back to his face. He was busy worrying a fingernail. “I suppose it is a bit ‘lie back and think of England’ isn’t it? Sorry. Apparently, I’m quite excited about this.” 

“Can tell that, yeah." She wondered how long he'd been thinking about it, not daring to approach her with his great passion. The idea made her tingly with sudden generosity. “Well. Wouldn’t mind more kissing, and maybe a bit of this...” She grinned, mimicking his hand dance from before. 

The lightbulb that went on over his head nearly blinded her. Oh god. He'd had an IDEA.

She was seriously considering a sprint to the door when he caught her by the ankles and dragged her butt down to the edge of the mattress. 

***

“You play a wicked game of bingo, Milady.” 

_Milady? Well, la di da._ Jackie double-knotted the loops of the plastic shopping bag that held her winnings – and all the stuff she’d had to buy to get the damned bag. The stun-gun in her pocket banged against her hip as she turned to get a look at the speaker. 

Hhmm. Not a bad looking guy; bit of a paunch, probably hiding a receding hairline under that cap with “Lakers” written on it. “Thanks. Yeah. Got lucky.” 

“That was more than luck. That was pure skill.” 

Truth was, he was right. She’d been on fire! After a bad start, bit of trouble making out what the caller was calling, she became a powerhouse of concentration, marking the tickets like lightning, using both hands at once. Five hundred and eighty-three dollars richer than when she’d come in, she smiled at him. Couldn’t have wiped the smile off her face even if she tried. “How’d you make out?”

“Not a dime.” 

“Aw, shame. Can’t be winners every time though, yeah? What’d we have to look forward to?"

“Gotta say, I just love the way you talk. It’s like… music.”

“Really? You think? That's not something I hear said of it often.” 

“Where you from, if you don’t mind me asking?” 

She started to answer the usual way, but realized he wouldn’t know South side from East end anyway. “London.”

“London, England! Wow. You're a long way from home."

"Tell me about it."

"Name’s Jim, by the way. Jim Daniels.” He held out his hand and she shook it. 

“Jackie Tyler.” Turned the charm up a notch. “You got a brother named Jack?” 

He grinned. “Nope. Got an uncle by the name of Beam though, works at the Bay Lounge ‘round the corner, if you’d care to be introduced.” 

“Wouldn’t say no to a drink,” she said. “Though you ought not expect me to buy, just cuz I got money all of a sudden. You best behave too." She leaned in close and whispered. "I’ve got a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it.” 

“I hope you’re legal to carry it, Jackie.” He leaned in close right back at her. “I’m a retired cop.”

***

As soon as he’d helped her squiggle out of shorts and camisole, the condoms were all but forgotten, scattered like a multi-colored halo around her head. 

Rose was slick as melted butter now, and he, with his usual appreciation for stuff like melted butter, was lapping it up, a practiced assurance that surprised her, even though she’d seen his tongue in action on many other things not her. Still, she couldn’t recall ever having quite so much butter to melt before. It was almost embarrassing. 

“You taste like muscles.”

The statement threw her for a loop. Took her out of the moment. Required her to think. _Muscles? Could he actually taste muscles? Why was he tasting her muscles? Why did he have to be so fucking weird_? She batted a hand in the vicinity of his head. “Stop talking.”

He didn’t. Murmured the words against her labia. “Mussels. And clams.” _Oh. Those kind of mussels_. “And oyster shooters sliding down the back of my throat.” 

Her thighs twitched, and his tongue dived back in to curve like spoon inside her. His whole face had to be covered in…butter by now. One thumb rolled over her clit slippery as a ball bearing. Apparently her clit really liked it, judging by the all the noise she was making.

Part of her mind, the part that was annoyed with the talking, wondered at the absence of other things that ought to be on any list of his – a race of Clam People, for example, that caught little humanoids, and cooked ‘em up in lobster pots on the beaches of… Clamydia or whatever. He always had to throw something like that in, just to show everyone else up. 

“You know what a cliché that is?” she said, aiming for blasé, and vaguely alarmed at the way her words came out all breathy and slurred, “Girls tasting like fish.” 

“Shell fish. The kind with pearls inside.” 

She gasped a little as he pushed two fingers in under his tongue and …twisted ever so gently. There followed a slightly uncomfortable corkscrewing motion. She worried that he was trying to find something in there that didn’t exist. Some extra bit that girls from his planet had. _Had_ had. She found herself squirming away from his fingers. His head came up, telegraphing his question even though she couldn’t see his face that well in the dark. When did it get dark? How long had he been there awaiting an answer? Did she want him to stop turning and turning inside her? 

She didn’t want to bring up girls or dead planets he would never ever see again, or what they had that he was hoping to find by twisting his fingers like that. She tried to laugh it off, but it came out a squeak. “You won’t find pearls in th – oh!” Knuckles, and long, long fingers, and his fingertips reaching up like antennae — 

“What’re you doing? What are you— Oh!” Something, something, he found something! Above the something, his tongue moved over the slickery knob of her clitoris. Inside, beneath, his fingertips slid like a dragon over hoarded treasure, the treasure that was the something, the mythical something the existence of which had been discussed with girlfriends for hours and hours like other people discussed the existence of god and this was better than this was oh god oh god do that that that thatthatthatthat--  
Orgasm burst into a billion bits of light behind her eyes, melted her senses, made her wail and laugh, and nicely curled her toes. 

He chuckled softly, and laid his cheek on her thatch. “I found a pearl.” 

After a few moments or possibly forever, he crawled up between her splayed knees, until his eyelashes brushed her cheek, his breath moist and hot at her throat, smelling of her, palm scanning her flesh, not quite touching until planting itself softly over her left breast and the hard thump of her heart. She could feel the bits of molecules between them spinning and whirling, all the tiny hairs on their bodies electrified. 

“May I come in now, Rose?” 

She opened her eyes, and smiled into the dark. “You may.”

**one…**

 

The Bay Lounge wasn’t round the corner so much as across a car park, right next to a Chinese restaurant called Chung’s. Booths, dark and cozy, lined one wall, with candles in pebbled glass holders on the tables. 

Jackie wasn’t ready to cozy up in a booth with Jim Daniels just yet, so they sat at the bar with some of the regulars who were watching a game on the television hanging from the ceiling. At an alcove in the back a few people were playing video poker. The pings and whistles from the machines, the dull roar of the sports game, music and bursts of laughter, made it all seem comforting and familiar, only lacking the haze of cigarette smoke, which she found she didn’t miss at all. 

She ordered a Bay Spritzer, featuring rum, and twists of orange and lime on a little plastic sword. After some talk of Benny Hill, which, god help the poor bastard, informed all Jim Daniels understanding of the English, he leaned in close, and whispered, “Do you really have a gun, or were you pulling my leg?”

“If I’d been pulling your leg, you’d know it.” She nudged his shoulder with her own, flirting and pushing him away at the same. “Why? You gonna arrest me for it?” 

“Hey!” he said, holding up his hands, “Retired! Anyhow, I know for a fact a woman needs to do what she has to. Dangerous place we're living in. Especially for a babe like you."

“Too right you are.” She glanced around to make sure no one was looking then pulled the stun-gun out of her pocket just far enough so that he could see it cuddled up to her palm. “This against the law?”

“Nope. Handy item. Problem is, someone grabs you, arm lock, head lock, you gotta step away from them before you can use it, or else you can get a pretty hefty jolt yourself.” 

She shoved it back in the pocket with a snarl of disgust. That figured didn’t it? Friend of the Doctor’s leaves ‘em stranded with a crap weapon barely useful at close range. 

“Tell whoever gave it to you, you’d be better off with a small caliber hand gun.”

“’M not gonna carry a bleeding gun! Don’t wanna carry this thing but my– my girlfriend I’m staying with said I ought.” 

“Damn. You have a girlfriend. Puts me out of the running.” 

She did the shoulder thing with him again, and grinned. “Not that kind of girlfriend. We’re just traveling together. She’s…she’s off her head for some bloke, and I’m just…” She took a deep breath. _What? What are you doing Jackie, my girl_? “Lending my support.” 

“Bad break up, huh?

“Don’t know they were ever together,” Jackie muttered around her straw. 

“Uh huh. So, either he’s married or she’s stalking him.”

“Little of both,” she admitted. Then shook her head. “Neither. It’s very…complicated.” 

Nice one, Jackie. Right. Complicated. Wouldn’t have been able to explain it even if she _could_ explain it. The way Rose looked at that man. Alien. Mannish alien. Whatever he was, he was God to Rose. Jackie still had the urge to slap the bastard whenever she saw him. Slap him, or kiss him in gratitude, or beat and pound on him hard with her fists for making it necessary for her to be grateful in the first place. 

That relationship wasn’t about romance or sex or anything so ordinary. It was bigger than love, Rose said, and better than sex. Though Jackie suspected Rose, at twenty, hadn’t had really good sex yet, even so, who on earth ever got to experience anything like that? How could she come back to a life she was bound to find wanting? Colorless? Dull? Life on earth was never going to be bigger than love and better than sex. 

 

_**two…**_

 

There is nothing, NOTHING better than sex, Rose thinks, as his body glides over and into her again. Her hand cups the back of his neck, raking the hair at his nape, fingers digging into his skull as a stream of words in languages he thinks she understands, knows she can’t quite hear, curl like smoke into her head. 

Love is huge and everywhere inside her now. He loves her, and she loves him. 

 

Effervescent, thats what he feels. Fizzy and frothy and sparkling – altogether champagne-ish, little bubbles pop, pop, pop inside his head. It’s not like waking up because he hasn’t exactly been asleep. But this moment, every moment in this one, yes, it’s all about syncing up the hearts – the drumming heart and the heart of fire – in perfect harmony with the sweating and the grunting. 

Later he’ll do the classic soap opera coming-out-of-a-coma scene – “Wha…? Huh? Where am I? Oh goodness, I seem to have my dick in your private bits, however did that happen?” – because he suspects it’s going to be awkward and she might think it’s a little her fault that way. Part of him believes it _is_ a little her fault, but he’ll forgive her for pressing that matchbook into his hand. Forgive her for making him do this to her. 

If she hadn’t given him the matchbook he’d have gone – well not home, because that is not his beautiful house, but he’d be _there_ , doing _this_ with Sandy, not here with rosy Rose, this slick, slide, suction cup of a girl beneath him, and over him, and oh, from behind, look at _that_ , yes, that’s nice, what was I– 

doing this _to_ Sandy, rather. The distinction is important he thinks. 

 

 

Harlow Valois, AKA the Bug Man, put light to another cigarette and blew out a noisy raspberry with a stream of smoke. So far, he hadn’t heard anything he hadn’t heard a million times before. Married man. Hot young thing. Motel bed. Fold together and shake vigorously. 

Had to admire the guy’s stamina, but Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, they’d been fucking forever. Come on, dude. Get to the money shot, and make with pillow talk already. 

He pulled the headset from his ears and left it looped around his neck so he could still hear if anything besides oh god, oh baby was said. He was recording, of course, as well as transmitting live to the clients, so, strictly speaking, he didn’t need to listen in at all. But remote transmitters went wonky sometimes, and some other times clients neglected to pay the balance owed. Always best to have a little insider potential for insurance purposes. He reached over and toggled a switch on the panel in front of him. “Travis?”

“Yeah,” came the low reply. In the background Harl could hear the distinct huzza buzz of a drinking establishment. 

“Where’s our momma?” he asked.

“At the bar with some guy.” Ping, ping, bleep, bleep, bleep, ping, ping. 

“You playing video poker on my dime?”

Travis chuckled. “I’m following at a discreet distance, Boss.”

“You win I get half. Who’s the fella with her?”

“Random pick-up looks like.” 

“Don’t bet on it. If nothing changes check me in an hour.” 

He placed the headset back over his hears. Yep, still going. He yawned. Years in the business had taught him a couple of things. One, coffee was a diuretic. And two, sex was boring as hell when you weren’t the one having it. 

He glanced at his watch. Oh, just _come_ already for the love of God-- 

Hey. Hey now. He shook his wrist, peered close at the watch again. Checked the digital timer on the receiver and did a double take usually only managed by cartoon characters. He actually felt his brain rattle. The digital timer confirmed what the watch said.

Two minutes? Two fucking minutes? 

OK. Well. That can’t be right. 

 

_**three…**_

 

Jackie was having trouble leaving. There was always another drink. Another song she liked. Another joke to tell. A sudden, intense interest in whether the men in the black shorts won or lost. Which should have tipped her off right away. It was a basketball game. 

She tried to ring Rose at the motel, but the pay phone was out-of-order. She asked to borrow Jim Daniels mobile, but when he reached into his jacket for it, he realized he must have left it in his car. She asked the barmaid to call her a cab, and just as the woman started to punch in the number, she accidentally dropped the phone into a sink full of soapy glasses. Jim offered to give her a ride, but when they got outside his car was nowhere to be found. 

 

In his office at DeepTime, Bobby Dexter was leaning back in his ergonomically comfy, very expensive leather chair. His arms were behind his head, and his feet on the desk were close enough to his coffee cup to pose a danger to the laptop currently playing the sweet sweet sounds of love. He wished there were pictures to go with the sound, but pinhole cameras required rather more set up time than they’d had. Still he couldn’t help but giggle. 

“He really doesn’t know, does he? I do believe we’re actually going to pull this off.” He’d had a heart stopper when the Doctor said he’d missed the girl, but seems it was merely the fastest way into her pants. 

Eugenie Bajul sat next to him, with a sour expression and her arms crossed tight over her chest. This seemed to be her default body language of late. It wasn’t the best look for that body. 

“Problem?” he asked.

“He’s a bastard!”

“You do remember you’re not actually his wife, right?”

“Well, he doesn’t know that, does he? You told me he was _ethical_.” She spat the word ethical at him like he was the one humping some girl. 

“Well, yes, _his_ version of it, anyway. Bit of an autocrat, truth be told. Anyway, what the hell do you care? All you have to do is be the bestest, most supportive wife ever when he comes home to you. Which he will. Oh, oh, I know I know! _Apologize_ for being such a bitch! Stroke him and pet him and tell him he’s been working too hard. Really drive the guilt knife in and twist.”

“He’ll probably come home and not kiss me until he’s showered. Isn’t that what men do?” 

“If he has any brain left, he'll shower before he comes home. Eugie, cheer up. This can only work in our favor. Tomorrow, he’ll pat the two point fives on their little heads and, wracked with guilt, finish the decryptions, and move on to design-- oh, wow.” He cocked his head smiling at the sounds of a laughing, sobbing tsunami ride to orgasm. He could practically hear the bed falling apart as it banged fast and furious into a wall. 

“You hear that? That’s just two bodies going at it. The Doctor, bless him, is really just a buttload of gigabytes now."

"Twelve hundred forty-two," Eugenie said automatically, then went back to biting at a cuticle. 

"Right. Buttload as I said. We’ve got the funding in place, right?" She nodded. "By this time next week his brain will literally be in the J.A.R, we’ll have a virtual model of his machine, you’ll be a widow, and everything will be just peachy."

 

_**four…**_

 

Her hair is tangled and there are clumps of it sticking to her forehead, cheeks, and throat. Breasts loll and her flesh jigs to the rhythm of his pounding, pounding, pounding. Her expression is one he can’t interpret – pain or pleasure, fear or ecstasy. There’s a harem in his head, soft fleshy women naked and glistening. A plink and plash of water as they climb into the bathing pool. This is a memory! He’d nearly lost his head in harem until he’d convinced the sultan he was, for all intents and purposes, a eunuch. 

He laughs out loud at that, and Rose’s eyes go wide. Is she beautiful? Is this beautiful? It feels good but it isn’t pretty. 

“Doctor?” she whispers. Her voice is raspy. She needs tending. Watering. Some other cultivation metaphor.

“Almost,” he says into her mouth, hooks her knees over his arms and stretches wide the window of opportunity. Minutes into hours, hours loop back. An orobourous. 

*** 

As soon as Jackie started moving in the direction of the motel her feet got heavier, like she was trying to power walk with twenty-pound ankle weights. Rose was in trouble. She could sense it. Keep moving, she thought, your calves can always use the workout. 

And because Jackie Tyler was nothing if not determined, the world compensated by slowing way _way_ down. If she could fly through the air kicking bullets out of the way in slo-mo that might have been useful. As it was, she found herself pushing against a wall of cling film. It gave, but not enough for her to move through it. 

No one else seemed to notice they were moving in slow-motion. But she could plainly see the snail trail of traffic, plainly hear the low rumbles of sound stretching out and taking forever to reach her ears. Why did she notice it at all? Why wasn't she inside it like everyone else-- 

_Him_. Of course, him. She’d been in that ship of his. Must have rearranged her molecules, or her brain chemistry, something like that. Oh, she was _so_ going knock him into the next century when she got hold of him, and she wouldn't need a bloody time machine to do it. 

Behind her she could hear Jim calling, his voice stretched out into a long, low, “Jaaaacckkkiiiee! Wwaaaaiiiitttt uuuupppp!” She covered her ears, and leaned in hard. There was no way she'd allow any cling film of Time to keep her away from her daughter. 

 

_**five…**_

 

~ “please, please, please,” she says, “please,” and he’s not sure what she’s pleading  
for, and he can’t tell if her hands pressed against his chest are stroking him or trying push him away. It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter what he feels, what she feels, because he _knows_ if he just keeps going, pumps and pushes and shoves hard enough, that the Mother of all bubbles, the one dancing from lobe to lobe to cortex and back again, will burst, and the universe trapped inside it will pour out and fill him up and that will be just _fucking_ peachy 

 

 _ **ssssiiiiiixxxx…**_

 

My lover’s mouth been so good to me,  
my lover’s mouth been so good to me,  
promised joy for a jailhouse,  
and a broken key.  
He keeps rearranging their bodies. There’s a pattern, the perfect shape, if he can just _find_ it. His right hand here, and then her left leg like this —no. Knee up, her arm over his —no. Her mouth, his fingers —no. Losing the rhythm. Losing cohesion. There’ll be nothing of him left. Nothing. He’s flying apart— 

Now it’s him pleading, _break break break please open just pop burst me open I think I can’t think, I can’t please–_

“Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose.”

She opens her eyes. _All of them_. The eye of her womb and the eye at the center of her forehead and her heart’s eye and each eye on her fingers and toes. Every eye, looking at him. She places her hands/eyes over his hearts, and each and every single nerve in his body lights up. His muscles vibrate in time with this pulsing incandescence. Oh, oh. This is the _other_ Rose. The thousand-petals of a lotus blossom, Rose. She places the pad of her thumb to his forehead, and his eyelids shutter so that he can only look _inside_. She reaches down between them, fingers a wide-open V sliding along his belly and slipping into the apex where their bodies are joined. 

“Breathe,” she commands. 

Oh. _Breathe_. Yeah. Right. 

His breath. Hers. One breath, stretching out forever and ever. Stretching out, around, in, through, out, through, in him, in her, around and around and into her many eyes he falls, and falls into the pearly chambers of a nautilus. Her sex. His. Whirling, rising up and

“Flow,” she whispers, a long sigh curled like smoke, like a serpent inside. Beneath his skin, the song of _all-time-is-now_ and _every-when_ begins to hum. Upon his lap Shakti smiles with her entire being and calls him forth. 

“Come. With. Me. Now. _Come_.”

 **POP**

 

_**seven** _

The barrier gave way so suddenly that Jackie stumbled forward, knees hitting the pavement, hands slapping it too, just barely keeping her face from kissing it hard. She twisted round, completely exhausted, and sat down in the middle of the street to take stock of herself. The furious pounding of her heart, and the way her body shook felt like she’d been running for hours. She felt a hundred years older too, but around her the world had returned to its ordinary spin. 

A few seconds later, Jim Daniels was at her side, breathing hard himself. He _had_ been running. “Jesus,” he panted, leaning over with his hands on his knees. “You all right?” 

“Yeah,” she sighed. 

“What the _hell_ was that?” 

At his tone, she looked up at him sharply. “You felt it? You saw it?”

“It was like— it was— what the hell was that?”

She pushed her hands into her hair. “I dunno. But I know who will.” She made to get to her feet, and he grabbed her arm and helped her. The plastic bag full of money was on the ground a few feet away and she snatched it up and looped it over a wrist. “I’ve got to get back to the motel,” she said, already walking. 

“Be faster in my car.”

She stopped, and turned, about to give him hell and then some. If he had the damned car why pretend he didn't know where it was before? 

His head was cocked, looking at her, but his arm was out, hand waving in the direction of a gray SUV parked in a lot just beyond a grassy verge. 

“I swear to God, I don’t know why we couldn’t see it before.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Reckon someone didn’t want us to see it.”

“Huh,” Jim Daniels said. 

***

The Doctor lay on his back, one arm flung over his head, watching a roach crawl across the acoustic tiles on the ceiling above his head. He felt sticky, enervated in body, while his jittery mind, suddenly aware, was bounding about trying to worry several hundred thousand things at once, a puppy in a room full of chew toys. OK, so it was not the millions of things at once he might normally be aware of if he were working on all thrusters, but several hundred thousand was a good start. 

He watched the slow progress of the roach, and idly analyzed the chemical composition of various amino acids and peptides evaporating with the sweat on his skin. Her sweat mostly, and lots and lots endorphins. Dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin: combined with sodium chloride and urea, and a variety of neurotransmitters, uniquely his, temporal in nature. 

The need to replace electrolytes occupied his thoughts for nano-second. Thirst, and the fact that he would, in a matter of minutes be absolutely starving. He wanted a shower. 

_He could have hurt her_. 

He ought to be getting up. 

_She’s going to want to talk about it_. 

One of the acoustic tiles was broken at a corner edge, and the roach crawled into the hole. Inside that hole another sort of bug waved its figurative antennae at him. He could feel it, the hum and buzz, a frisson of energy traveling the subcutaneous tissue beneath his skin. 

Overhead, a voice-activated listening device had been transmitting every grunt and moan and cry to a van parked on the next street over. He’d have to do something about it before Rose woke up. She’d start talking. He’d have to—

He couldn’t even turn his head and look at her, snoring softly next to him. He was ashamed and his shame made him feel ... resentful. And worse, despite this shame, despite his languor, thirst, soon-to-be need for nourishment in the form of tacos, or possibly bacon and eggs, he felt a twitch in the nether regions. Awakened from its long, _long_ hibernation, the little monster would not stay down. 

The Doctor wanted to believe he’d been terribly clever, hiding himself in such a way that could only be triggered to… _upload_ as it were, by sexual intercourse. Really fantastic sexual intercourse. Problem was, it was very unlikely he’d’ve thought of it in the first place. In fact, the persistent resurgence of sexuality had been entirely unexpected by his previous incarnation. Unwelcome, actually. Impossible hope rearing its ugly knob, because there was no hope, just biology desperate to assert itself. Gawd. All that talk about _dancing_. Genetic material really hated being the last of its kind. 

Even so, if Dexter, and the woman (whoever, or whatever she was) hadn’t written Professor Johnny as such a cad the Doctor might have remained buried, never sought out at all. And he would be…

What? What were they doing? There was still a lot he was missing. DeepTime was a whopping load of crap, and he knew it. Surely they did as well. 

Bother. He’d have to get up, wouldn’t he? A shower was in order. Traditionally it should be a cold shower. He could neatly take care of two problems at once. 

He rose carefully so as not to disturb his slumbering friend, and got a chair to stand on in order to remove the transmitter from the ceiling. It was in his hand when he heard Rose stir, mumble,

“Whadyadoin’?”

 _Standing naked on a chair, of course_. 

She peered at him through slitted eyes smudged and ringed with mascara, a soft frown of mild curiosity between her brows. Her hair was ratty, sticking out at odd angles on the pillow, and a thick clump of it clung to her cheek. Mouth swollen, skin covered in a patina of dried perspiration, mottled red marks staining throat and breasts, she nevertheless looked extremely…fuckable. He swallowed. Hard. “Fuckable” wasn’t even a real word. 

“Hey. There. You.” He closed his fist around the transmitter, and put on his most charming of smiles as he hopped down. “I’m- I’m just going to pop in the shower, do you mind? Great.” 

***

The Doctor was having a shower. _Right_ after. Rose had expected more cuddling, given the way he was before they'd had the sex, but a shower right after, well, that could be just the way he did things. Perfectly normal. For him. Right. Could do with one herself, certainly. 

So why did she have this horrible horrible feeling that it meant something…well, horrible. She could hear her mother’s voice twanging in her head. “Ooh wonder why he’s in such a rush then? Could it be because he still thinks he’s MARRIED?”

Oh yeah, well show’s what you know, Mum. Just so happens he’s very fastidious, and—

Oh shit, her mum! What time was it? Oh shit—

Erm. That time couldn’t be right. There was something wrong with the clock. They’d been at it for hours and hours. There were parts of her body she was afraid to move on account of the hours and hours. Oh! 

This could mean he _was_ the Doctor after all. Manipulating time. Which, actually seemed worse. If this was how the Doctor, _her_ Doctor behaved after—

Get a grip. Only a shower. She was more troubled by the fact that she’d kind of blacked out toward the end there. 

The shower shut off, and then the toilet flushed. Which made her aware of the need to pee, which made her aware that the pleasant ache between her legs would not feel so pleasant when she actually did pee. Being female. Blessing and curse. 

After a few minutes he came out, towel wrapped around the lower half of him, other towel in hand and rubbing his hair into a familiar tufty mess. The heat blast of steam that followed him made the A/C cough and sputter in a valiant effort to crank up the cool. He smiled at her in an old familiar way, and she sighed inside, and smiled back. Then his eyes went all soft, and he _smiled_ at her. In a new familiar way. He was at the bed in an instant, kissing her quick and hard. 

“I should have taken a cold shower,” he murmured. “Sorry about that condom business.” His hand brushed over her breast, wandered down to burrow between her legs. “I just loved the names, and the packages were so colorful. Probably didn’t need them. Fairly certain we didn’t.” His fingers inside, thumb flicking over her clit. She was really sore but her cunt twitched anyway. More kissing, his tongue looping around hers. She moaned into his mouth. Then his lips parted hers with a noisy smack.

“For heaven’s sake Rose,” he said, “we don’t have time for this!” His fingers withdrew with a squelching sound, and he slapped her lightly on the bum. “Up. Up. Come on, get dressed.”

She blinked, mumbled her confusion at him.

He picked up his trousers from the floor and stuck a foot in one of the legs, hopping a little. “I've disassembled their transmitter, and flushed it. They’ll figure it soon enough and we need to be gone before they get here.”

“What? They? Who they?”

Zipping and buttoning, he gave her a look of patient annoyance. “Well, I know them as Dexter and the Little Woman. That whole lot at DeepTime. Pretty sure they’re the ones spying on us.”

“Spying on us?”

“Are you going to just repeat everything I say?”

“Oh my god. Somebody was listening?” The words came out in a register almost too high for dogs to hear.

“Yeah. So get up, and get dressed.”

“I don’t even get a shower?”

“No time for that!”

“Can I at least pee first?”

He thrust his arms into his shirt’s sleeves and gave an exasperated sigh, “Humans. Honestly. No sense of priorities.” 

She got up, slowly, trying not to groan. She was sore in places she didn't even know had muscles. A furtive glance to see if he was watching drew a groan out of her anyway. 

He was sucking on his fingers. The same fingers that had been in her moments ago. 

"What?" he said off her look. "They're all gooey."

***

The Doctor fidgeted, glanced at the clock on the nightstand, and harrumphed. He could feel a buzz running under his flesh and wasn't sure it was from being all pent up or if it was causing the pent-up. The muscles in his jaw jerked spasmodically.

“You know,” came the voice from behind the bathroom door, “this would go a lot faster if you weren’t standing there waiting for me to hurry up.”

“Can't you run water or something?”

“How about the shower?”

Oh, her _sarcastic_ voice. “Rose—“

“Just cover your ears, will you?”

“Ookay,” he said, rolling his eyes, then squinted into dingy corners as if squinty would help him figure out what in the little room was making him so jumpy. _Aside_ from the fact that she was dithering about in there. He pushed away from the wall trying to track the sensation. 

“Are your ears stopped?”

“Uh huh.”

“They are not!”

“Fine! Yes. All right. Here I go, fingers in ears. There. Can’t hear a thing!” 

Maybe he was just hungry. He pulled a Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bar from his jacket pocket and started to unwrap it—

“Doctor?” Oops. She called out a bit louder. “Doctor?”

“La la la. What’s that? Are you saying something? Can’t hear you!”

Her silence was loud with suspicion. But after a few seconds he heard liquid splashing into the bowl, and other sounds -- hissing, and whimpering, and maybe a little sob or two, but by then he’d located the source of his problem, and wasn’t paying the least attention to her.

“Oh, bloody hell,” he muttered. 

"You never had your ears stopped, did you?" 

The other transmitter was inside an ashtray on the pressboard/plastic credenza by the door. He picked up the ashtray, shook it, turned it over then dropped it to the floor and stomped on it. The plastic cracked, split, shattered. The transmitter slid under the baseboard heater. 

He was on his hands and knees fishing it out when Jackie Tyler burst into the room and hit him with several thousand volts of a mother’s love.

***

“Who are you people?”

“Oh for the love of--- Mum! Now look what you’ve done. He’s forgot _again_!”

“I said I was sorry.” Jackie helped the Doctor to sit on the edge of the bed— _her_ bed, part of her mind noted with annoyance. The bedding was all rucked-up and clammy feeling, and she didn’t have time to process the reasons for that just yet, not with Rose glaring at her, and himself just sitting there blinking stupidly, looking like a sad little kicked puppy. “I didn’t know it was you, I swear!” 

Rose’s mouth was tight with obvious disbelief at this. She looked quite formidable despite the fact she was wearing nothing but a smallish towel. 

Yeah, all right, she’d had a suspicion the bum she’d tagged with the stun gun might have belonged to the Doctor. But it’d been dark in the room when she’d burst in all wrath-of-god. Well, dark-ish. The overhead wasn’t on, anyway. And it wasn’t as if she’d memorized the shape of his backside just from eyeing it once or twice… several times. Not enough to recognize it in the very nearly dark! 

“I’m sorry, Doctor, really I am,” she said, wringing her hands, pleading with whatever was left of his mind behind that bland expression. “Please don’t have amnesia. We’ll be stuck here forever if you keep having amnesia.”

“Huh,” Jim Daniels said. He’d been peering out the window, and let the curtains drop back, his attention fixed now on the skinny fellow twitching on the edge of the bed. “Amnesia. That’s…that’s weird.”

The man who didn’t remember he was the Doctor got a sudden deer-in-the-headlamps kind of look. “Is it? Seems perfectly reasonable to me.” 

“I’ve been a cop for twenty five years, and I never heard of a stun gun causing amnesia like that.”

“Well it has,” skinny fellow insisted, “I have no idea who you are, for example.”

“We haven’t met.” 

“I certainly wouldn’t remember if we had because I’ve got amnesia. From being electrocuted. By this woman I don’t know.” He locked an affronted gaze on said woman. Jackie, with the preternatural radar for sneakiness granted her by motherhood, zoomed in on the heel of his shoe surreptitiously nudging something under the bed. 

A condom wrapper. One of many illuminated by the harsh glare of the overhead light now that she started looking around a bit. As if her daughter’s lack of attire wasn’t clue enough, the entire room reeked of Eau de Shag. 

Her gaze focused in on the Doctor's carefully bland expression, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t remember a thing, do you?” 

“No. Nothing. Well, very little really. Hardly anything at all.” His knee began to bounce and his eyes shifted ever-so-slightly to the right. “Um…”

Jackie Tyler slapped him upside the head. “Amnesia my arse!” 

“Ow! My hair!” 

Rose heaved a sigh that nearly dislodged the towel. “That’s it,” she declared heading for the bathroom. “I’m having a shower.” 

“No!” the Doctor cried. He started to rise, but Jackie still had a fist balled up and he thought better of it. “We need to get out of here. Fifteen minutes ago! Honestly. I wasn’t lying about that.” 

“Why’d you lie about any of it, then?” Rose demanded, chin high as if she had some lofty high ground on which to stand with her hair sticking out every which way and hickeys on her neck. 

He put his head in his hands and groaned, “I don’t know!” 

She crossed her arms over her chest, squishing her breasts into a high cleavage, mirroring her mother’s stance. “Coward,” she muttered under her breath. 

He looked up, glaring at her fiercely. “It may surprise you to know, but I’ve never been in a situation quite like this – _ever_. And excuse me, but who was it hid in the bathroom while I was writhing on the floor in agony?”

She reddened, but her embarrassment only served to piss her off even more. “Well, I was _naked_ ,” she sniffed.

“Six and half minutes to figure out you could wrap a towel about yourself. Meanwhile there I am, cooking in my own skin—”

“You used all the big towels! And why? Because. You. Took. A. _Shower_.” 

“What?” Jackie gasped her hands pressed over her heart. “Not… not _right after_?” 

“Sorry I don’t know all the post-coital protocols. Did you miss the part about me being clueless?” 

“You certainly weren’t clueless when we were doing it!”

“Oh my god. You bastard.”

“Oh, shut up.” 

“Don’t you tell my mother to shut up!”

“Ow, stop hitting my hair! My hair really hurts! From all the _voltage_ that's gone through it recently!” 

"You're lucky I--"

A piercing whistle cut through the exchange, and everyone turned to look at Jim Daniels making the time-out sign. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe we ought to deal with some actual pressing issues. Like that slow-motion time incident--" The Doctor made a sound suspciously like eep, flushed to his hairline, and then cleared his throat a couple of times. Jim assumed he had something to say on the subject, but he just shook his head and waved that Jim should continue. "That and the fact that me and Jackie were followed to this motel. There’s a car across the lot— Jesus! Don’t all of you look at once! _Goddamn_.” He removed the Laker’s cap and ran a hand back over a head that had very little hair, sighing heavily. “Christ all-mighty. Harkness was right. You people need a lot of handling.”

“Harkness? Jack Harkness?” Rose said. 

“You know Jack?” Jackie squeaked. “Is that why you were chatting me up? Cos he told you to?”

“That, and you’re a damn fine looking woman.”

"Right!" The Doctor leapt up in a sudden whirl of frenetic energy that caused everyone else to jump back with curses, gasps or squeaks of alarm. He snatched clothes from the floor and tossed them at Rose. “I may have been followed here as well." Located his tie, threaded it through his collar, and knotted it with practised speedy efficiency. "And there was a Pest Control van on the next street when I was looking for a place to park. The Bug Man. Hilarious. Ha ha ha. So bleeding obvious the average person would never put two and two togeth--“ He stopped, eyes wide. “Oh shit.” He dived for the credenza, fingers scrabbling. “Idiot. Idiot.” He came up holding something that looked like a tie tack with a squiggly wire sticking out. He shook the little device and yelled into it, “Did you get all that? Did you have fun, you twisted little monkeys? Well, guess what? FUN’S OVER!” 

Mouth curled into what could, under happier circumstances, be the smile of an insane clown, he proceeded to squeeze the thing between his thumb and forefinger like a big juicy cockroach. As it was plastic and metal it didn’t exactly squish, but he seemed to relish the tactile experience of trying; a process that took several long seconds to accomplish, until his hand was trembling from the effort, and all the tendons from that hand all the way up to his neck and jaw stood out in sharp relief. His expression had gone from twisted grimace to the kind of scary only a select few had ever witnessed. One of those select few decided to get dressed in a godawful hurry. By the time it was over, and the device was crushed to a wafer, both Jackie and Jim had taken several steps back from the Doctor, ready to rush screaming into the parking lot if he made a sudden move towards them. He looked up, slightly dazed. Then his face broke into a huge grin. “I think any further discussion should be done whilst driving a crazy fast get away car. How about you?”

***

“So,” the Doctor asked Jim, “how do you know Jack Harkness?” 

He was driving Jim’s SUV, and Jim, from his position in the back seat, was still a little confused at how this particular scenario had come to pass. The Doctor had also disabled the built in GPS with assurances he could easily fix it up again, and many assurances that he was a good driver and he knew where they were going, and anyway wasn't it nice to be chauffered about like a swell. He'd actually used the word "swell." 

They’d taken SUV because it was faster than the rented Taurus. The Doctor was currently navigating the side streets in a leisurely manner, while a non-descript dark grey Plymouth followed at a not-terribly discreet distance. There was an undercurrent of panic in everyone but him.

Nevertheless Jim managed, “Until Jack tells me it’s your business to know, I’d say it’s not.” 

The Doctor pulled a “get him” face which Jim could see in the rearview mirror. “So he hasn’t told you who I am?”

“Are you somebody I should know?”

“Probably not.” 

“Definitely not,” Jackie muttered. Jim glanced at her then looked out the window. 

“Jack had concerns about you not being in your right mind, and the dangers that presented to the ladies.” He wasn’t too sure the Doctor had a “right” mind to start with. Jack’s concerns were warranted as far as he could tell. Yet here he was trusting this skinny English fella to know which side of the road his perfectly maintained made-in-America-by-god offroad vehicle with independent rear suspension and four-wheel drive should be driving on.

“I don’t understand what Jack's doing here in the first place,” the Doctor said. “He’s not supposed to be here yet.” He turned suddenly onto the main drag, unsurprisingly called Main, and sped up. 

“He’s helping us,” Rose said. “You should be glad he’s not dead.”

“Well, I knew he wasn’t dead. Didn’t I mention that?” He flicked a gaze at her. “Sorry, thought I had. Anyway, he’s not supposed to be here. _Yet_. And certainly not _here_.” He waved one hand about in a way that encompassed not only the street and town, but California, and the whole of America. 

Jackie put her nose in the air and said, in the manner of someone delivering news she hoped would get someone into trouble, “Jack’s been traipsing about in your TARDIS.” 

Rose drew in a hiss through her teeth.

The SUV swerved into the path of an oncoming truck then back again, tires squealing. Jim swore under his breath.

“ **What**?”

“Calm down,” Rose said, fingers white-knuckled, gripping the dashboard. “It’s perfectly okay.”

“Okay? _Okay_? Nononononono. He can’t do that! Who said he could do that? He doesn’t know what he’s doing! He could slip her into an oblique malfrescance."

"A what?"

"Something you couldn't understand." 

"Because you just made it up," Rose muttered.

"She’s very, very sensitive.”

Apparently still pissed off about the shower business, Rose twisted the knife a little. “Well, he’s a very sensitive man, isn’t he? Must have the touch.” 

“Oh yes,” Jackie intoned from the backseat, “He’s hopping here and there, all over. Been to see us here ‘least half a dozen times. Who knows where else he goes. Never says. Seems to know his way around your ship though.”

The Doctor looked exactly like a man who’d discovered his wife was cheating on him with his best friend. 

“Look,” Rose said, putting her hand on his arm. He flinched. “You trusted him to repair stuff before. He must have figured some of it out. The TARDIS needs to get back to you right? Doing it the only way she can.”

The Doctor heaved a sigh. "But, he's not me." 

“I have no idea what you people are talking about,” Jim said, “but you might want to be aware we’ve picked up another tail.” 

To Jim Daniels everlasting horror, this news only made the Doctor smile. Hard. The SUV jerked forward like a horse to the spurs, crossing double yellow lines to pass three cars, and managed to take the hairpin turn onto the coastal highway without rolling.

“I’m just gonna assume you have a plan,” Rose said, her voice admirably steady.

“Yep. We’ll be drinking margaritas by the sea, mamacita.”

Rose’s brow wrinkled in confusion, and Jim wracked his brain to recall the reference. But it was Jackie who called it.

“Oh my God! He’s going to drive us off a sodding cliff!” 

The Doctor assured them all that he had no intention of driving them off a cliff. And besides, “Thelma and Louise drove their car over the edge of the Grand Canyon, didn’t they? We’re hundreds of miles from there.” 

They were not hundreds of miles from a sheer drop into the Pacific Ocean however, as Rose was intensely aware by virtue of being in the front seat on the passenger side of an American SUV. The reflectors of guardrails strobed past her as the Doctor blithely took the curves at 100 k per hour, one hand on the wheel and the other fiddling with the radio tuner. He seemed to have forgotten entirely that he’d lost control of a BMW just this morning on this very stretch of highway. 

“Grand Canyon,” he mused, skipping past Shania Twain in favor of Nine Inch Nails. “Beautiful country. We should visit later, after this whole mess is settled. Ride donkeys down. Ever ridden a doh— oh, _oh my_ —“ 

‘ _I want to fuck you like an animal. I want to feel you from the in--_ ’ 

“Yes, well.” He poked at a button with his finger. “Moving on…oh Devo! Brilliant! They had flowerpot hats.”

‘ _I’ve got an uncontrollable-- he’s got an uncontrollable urge--_ ’ A more frantic pushing of buttons followed. ‘ _Yoooouuu shook me aaallll night lonng--_ ’ 

“Okay, this is just—“ 

‘ _let’s talk about sex, baby—‘_

“Gah!” The tires made loud rapid-fire farting noises as they wobbled over the bumps of lane dividers in the center of the highway.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jackie cried. “Stop playing with the radio and drive the damned car!”

“I’m _not_ playing with it,” he yelled back, stabbing at the tuner indiscriminately. “Someone or something is playing with me.”

‘ _And when I get that feeling, I want sexual healing. Sex-u-al healing, oh baby--_ ’

“Marvin – bloody – Gaye! Oh, come on!” 

The bubble of hysteria Rose’d been holding in burst explosively from her tightly compressed lips. Spittle sprayed the inside of windscreen and that made her laugh even harder. 

The Doctor glared at her. “This is very like what happened this morning. I crashed that car if you’ll recall.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth, tears streaming from the corners of her scrunched up eyes as she struggled to reign in her hilarity.

 _’--sex on the brain, pumped in my veins—‘_

“I think it’s a message,” Jackie informed him. 

“Do you?” he sighed, listlessly hitting another button. Spinal Tap’s Sex Farm song was next, with the pitchfork and the poking in hay references. He glanced over at Rose snorting through her nose, hand still clamped over her mouth. She was going to burst something vital soon. 

“Yes. It’s God telling you to keep your business in your trousers from now on lest… ye… be smited with His mighty…wrathful…” She faltered, her understanding of biblical lore flailing, “fiery pits of—“

“—Marvin Gaye!” Rose yelped, and fell back into her seat gasping out guffaws and uncontrollable, unattractive braying. Normally, the Doctor would be laughing right along with her, and no one else would be in on the joke. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t like being the butt of the joke. Especially a cosmic joke. That was just—

“Hang on.” His eyes were on the road, but his vision was turned decidedly inward. The fingers of his right hand wriggled like antennae, hovering over the multitude of buttons and knobs on the radio. He glanced at Jim in the rearview mirror. “This is high definition radio.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Excellent!” The darkness of the rocky wall on the left suddenly gave way to a cluster of lights. He started playing with the tuner, a haphazard method to his madness as the soft hiss of static began to make a strange music all its own. 

“What are you trying to do?” Rose asked, wiping her eyes, grateful for once that he hadn’t given her anytime to reapply her mascara. 

“Send my own message. Hope a certain someone is paying attention.” 

The sign for Half Moon Bay loomed large, and he nearly missed the exit ramp. His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and he grinned unpleasantly. Rose twisted round. Her mum and Jim Daniels were watching out the back window as a set headlamps sped past the exit, slowed, and then bounced over a median strip to turn around. The second car tailing them hadn’t been fooled so easily. Those lights follow them west, towards the Pacific Ocean. She stopped hoping the Doctor’s plan had anything to do with tequila. 

 

Margaritas by the sea turned out to be large Sprites at a Taco Bell just outside Pillar Point. 

“Didn’t know I was so hungry,” Rose said around a mouthful of burrito. 

“Knew _I_ was. Absolutely famished for hours,” the Doctor said, tearing open a packet of fire sauce with his teeth. 

Jackie’s mouth was pursed in an effort to refrain from comment. Rose aided in this effort by looking pointedly at her mother and very noisily sucking up her beverage through the straw. Her mother’s eyed narrowed. The Doctor’s food choice suddenly became very interesting. “Has that got crisps in the middle of it?” 

“Yes!”

“Can I have a--” 

He pulled the weird tortilla diskette back from her approaching mouth. “No. You had your chance to experience seven layers of taste sensation wrapped in a soft flour tortilla, folded and grilled to perfection. This one here—” he said, pointing to the green paste— “is a layer not unlike actual guacamole. And this runny bit here could be refried beans. Tomatoes, nacho cheese, um, something else, not sure, and... Wait. That’s—that’s only six. Where’s my seventh layer?”

She jabbed her finger at whitish ooze. “Sour cream. Bet that’s the seventh.” 

“Oh. Right. Must be.”

“This is why Americans are so fat,” Jackie declared, waving her hand at the food, oblivious to the family of fat Americans taking offense a few tables away. Not that the Doctor had to worry much about fat content. Still, the sheer amount of paper wrapped tacos, burritos, and unidentifiable Mexican-ish comestibles heaped on the Doctor’s tray astonished her. He must have the metabolism of a teenaged boy. “Don’t know where you’re going to put all that,” she tsked, motherly fondness, grudging though it was, creeping into her voice. 

He winked, gave her his best high wattage smile, and patted his stomach. “Bigger on the inside, remember?” 

“You better be. Because I spent hard earned bingo money on that.” 

Jim leaned across the table, and in a loud conspiratorial whisper, said, “Is it of _any_ concern to _anyone_ here that the people following us have surrounded my SUV in the goddamned parking lot?”

The Doctor’s eyes widened and he whirled around in his plastic swivel chair to look out the window. There, on the other side of the giant bell, was the SUV. He grinned in relief, waggling his fingers in a friendly wave at the drivers still seated behind the wheels of the grey Plymouth and pest control van. He swiveled back and returned his attention to his food. “You had me worried for a second there.”

Jim opened his mouth, but before something rude could come out, the Doctor said, “Jim, Jim, Jim. That’s not _surrounded_. Surrounded would mean there were vehicles, or hostile Native Americans, on all sides of the car. The correct term in this case would be flanked.”

“That’s it.” Jim said whipping out his mobile. “I don’t know what Jack is up to with you people, but seems to me this is a serious police matter, not a sit-here-eating-burritos matter.” 

“Put your phone away. We’ll be all right. No need to get the police involved. Not just yet anyway.” He pointed at Jim’s quesadilla. “Are you going to eat that?” 

Jackie put her hand on Jim’s arm to stop whatever his arm was about to do. “I hate to give him credit because I’m still mad as hell, but honestly, if he says we’ll be all right, we will. He usually finds a way to get these things sorted.” 

The Doctor gawped at her for a second then blushed with pleasure. “Thank you, Jackie.” 

“Yeah, well, you and me are still going have a long chat when it _is_ sorted. Keep that in mind.”

The youngest member of the fat American family loudly announced the need to visit the toilet. The Doctor started. “That reminds me.” His lips closed around the beverage straw and he sucked up a few thoughtful swallows. “What’s going to happen to those kids I wonder?”

“Triple by-pass twenty years down the road, I’m thinking.” 

“Not those kids. The kids that called me Daddy.” 

Rose inhaled a piece of lettuce and he helpfully pounded on her back. “Kids?” She managed to rasp out.

“Sandy and I have three lovely children. Apparently. Though how we got them I’ve no idea.” 

“Sandy.” 

“My wife. The little woman. You remember. Don’t you? Please tell me I mentioned the wife. Though I think I kept changing her name just to shake her up a bit.” He paused to indulge a self-satisfied sneer. “The children though, were real. They certainly _smelled_ like children. And they acted like real children. I’m just wondering how they got them to act so…much like real children. Children as a rule aren’t that good at acting, except maybe that Haley Joel whatshisface who saw dead people.” He shuddered. “He was quite convincing.”

“Are you worried these people who had you might have done something to those kids? Like what they did to you?”

“All the parameters of a typical twenty-first century upwardly mobile human life, down to the tiniest detail, pressed into a not-easy-to-swallow pill? Yes.”

“You ever tried to get a child to swallow a pill, Doctor?” Jackie asked him with a wry grin. His gaze shot up, eyes wide and startled, glinting strangely in the harsh light of the restaurant. Her breath caught in her throat. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh.” 

He was very old. Rose had told her so, but she hadn’t truly believed it until this moment, until that flare of pain in his eyes, and the flat hollow look that followed. 

Parents shouldn't have to outlive their children. She started to reach out, struggling to find words, though there were no words that could encompass a thing like that. Her heart thumped loud in her throat, and the whoosh whoosh of her blood moving through her veins was louder still. Too loud really, frighteningly loud, until she realized part of that sound was the familiar asthmatic vworp vworp vworp of the Doctor’s ship.

He leapt up with a whoop, whatever she’d seen in him gone and forgotten. Taco Bell patrons were looking about in idle confusion for the source of the strange noise, though not one of them got up from a table or moved from their place in line to investigate. It wasn’t until Jim Daniels made a nervous joke about terrorist attacks that there was a rush for the doors. 

The Doctor scooped tacos and chalupas and chimichangas into his arms, took a farewell swallow from his giant beverage cup, and rushed to the alcove between the men’s and women’s lavatories where his precious TARDIS was currently materializing. Rose skillfully avoided the trail of fire sauce packets and paper napkins that littered the floor as she skipped after him. Jackie sighed, and took the trays and trash to the bins. 

“What the hell is that thing?” Jim said coming up beside her as she tossed the paper place mat from the final tray. 

“That’s our taxi, love. Oh look, see? There’s Jack.” 

“Took you long enough,” she heard Jack saying, “Songs about time, songs about evil women. Jumping Jack Flash, for Christ’s sake! I was afraid I’d run out of sex songs before you figured out it was me.” 

The Doctor practically shoved Jack Harkness out of the way in his hurry to get inside the blue phone booth thing. A sympathetic pat to Jack’s chest, and Jackie’s daughter shimmied in after her boyfriend. 

Jack looked after them, frowning and confused it seemed, but only for a second. As soon as he spotted Jim he was grinning huge, and next thing Jim knew he was being lifted off the ground in a bear hug. Considering Jim was more bear-sized than Jack could ever hope to be, it was quite a feat. “I knew you’d come through for me, you beautiful bastard!” 

“Was it ever in doubt?” Jim said after he’d extricated himself. “Owed you big time.” 

“Consider that debt paid in full.”

“Oh, I _do,_ believe me.”

Jack laughed. “That bad, huh?”

“You’ve no idea.”

“Mind what you say now,” Jackie said, poking him in the vicinity of his ribs. “Met me, remember.”

“Gotta confess, you putting the stun gun to that boy’s scrawny ass was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.” 

Jack glanced over at Jackie, impressed. “You tagged a bad guy?”

She reddened. “Misunderstanding really. Not that he didn’t deserve it.”

“Damn right, he did,” Jim said. He jerked his thumb at the view of the parking lot. “See that Chevy Tahoe in the middle there?” Jack nodded. “That’s mine.” 

“Oh. Picked a tail or two I see. No probs. I’ve got your taxi right here.”

“What’d I tell ya?” Jackie said, bumping against his shoulder in that way she had. “We’ll be out of here before they’ve blinked twice.”

Jim was pretty sure the blue Police Call Box no longer functioned as such, if it ever had. “What? Does it turn into a Checker Cab like some lame-ass Transformer?” He was forced to laugh at his own joke because they clearly weren’t getting it. Then it occurred to him: there was a blue Police Call Box in Taco Bell and he had no idea how it got there. Jack seemed to mistake his alarm over this for something else. 

“Trust me,” Jack said. “We’ll get you out of here safe.” 

“It ain’t about trust, Jack. It’s about my SUV. I still owe ten grand on it and my insurance doesn’t cover car chases or gun fire.”

“Guns?” Jack looked out the huge picture window.

Outside, the man in the pest control van seemed to be having a heated conversation with someone on his cell phone. He gestured to the man in the Plymouth then pointed at the three of them. The man in the Plymouth got out, a trifle reluctantly. From the way he was holding his hand over his pocket, he was probably packing a weapon.

“Oh fuck,” Jack whispered. 

Jim thumbed 911 on his cell phone, and waited for the call to be bounced all over hell and creation before it got connected to the local emergency services. He reached inside his jacket to his shoulder holster and gave it a pat. “You go hide in the phone booth. I’ll hold down the fort.” 

Jack eyed him a moment, then grabbed his face with both hands and gave him a quick, hard kiss on the mouth. “Looks like I owe you now.” 

Jim was still wiping his lips in shock when the doors to the police box closed, and the door to Taco Bell opened. Suddenly that noise started up again – a subsonic rumble that shuddered beneath his shoes, roared and whined inside his head. The light on top of blue box started flashing and all he could do was stand there dumbfounded as the whole kit and caboodle winked out of existence. 

The door to the women’s room banged suddenly against the now unobstructed wall. A chubby little girl came tearing out, sobbing hysterically about not being able to get the door open. A moment later he became aware of the guy from the Plymouth standing right next to him, staring with the same goggle-eyed disbelief at the empty alcove. It was another long moment before he remembered the Doctor still had his goddamned car keys. 

***

The Doctor dumped the contents of his arms onto the console, and began punching buttons and pulling levers with a ferocity Rose found…unsettling. She’d seen him beat the console with a rubber mallet the size of her head with far more tenderness. Jack and her mum barely made it inside before the TARDIS was moving. 

“Whoa!” Jack cried, crossing the floor in a bound to land right beside the Doctor. “No need to be so rough. I just recalibrated some of those systems.”

Rose drew in a sharp breath. A strange combustible aura shimmered around the Doctor. The slow manner in which he turned his head to gaze at Jack did not bode well. His clenched fists uncurled finger by finger, as if it was taking every tiny bit of will he could muster not to pick up the aforementioned rubber mallet and hit Jack over the head with it. Between gritted teeth, through something that in no way resembled a smile, he said, “You’ve cocked up the temporal interface, and the rotor’s completely out of sync.”

Jack pulled back. “Really? Huh. Was okay just a minute ago.” He leaned across the Doctor to grasp the snow globe currently serving as knob for the vortex loop control. The Doctor knocked his hand away. 

“I’ll handle things from here on out.”

Jack shrugged. Helped himself to a chalupa instead, ignoring the Doctor’s sputter of outrage as this boldness. “Think you’ll find she’s in good working order. In fact--” He peeled back the paper wrapping, took a huge bite and spoke around the chewing— “she’s been a very good girl for me, if you know what I mean.” The Doctor went pale, little blotches of red high on his cheeks like one of those kabuki guys. His mouth almost completely disappeared. Jack, very absorbed in his gnoshing, went blithely on. “You know, it’s funny, but back when we were traveling together, before the other you abandoned me on that station – which, we totally need to discuss by the way – I was kind of under the impression you needed, like, some telepathic connection to pilot the TARDIS. But she really responds to the hands-on approach. I have a theory, and I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think originally you would have needed, like, three or four people to operate her.” He laughed. “I worked up quite a sweat running around, learning how she liked to be handled, let me tell you, but man, she’s a _sweet_ ride when she’s all lubed up and calibrated, isn’t she?” 

The Doctor’s mouth opened and closed but nothing came out. 

“Anyway, soon as I got your coordinates off we went. Slipped out of the vortex and slid right into the interstices, smooth as silk. Wrapped the space around her like a lov--” 

“Stop!” 

“—er. What?” 

“Stop talking!” The Doctor had his hands over his ears. His professional-man-shoes screeched on the grating as he paced. “Just stop, stop, stop, stop it—“ He whirled on Jack suddenly, hands thrust out in the universally recognized gesture of strangulation. “For the love of Rassillon, shut the hell up!” 

“Holy shit,” Jack whispered. He blinked, swallowed the contents of his mouth with difficulty, and said, “What crawled up your ass?” 

“You! You crawled up my— “ The Doctor broke off, having realized that was so not the direction he wanted the conversation to take. 

Jackie leaned close to Rose and whispered, “Who’s Rassillon?” Rose shrugged.

Taking a deep breath and rolling his shoulders back, the Doctor looked down his nose at Jack Harkness, and said with a stiff, not-very-believable smile, “I’m here now. There’s no need for you to calibrate or- or _lube_ or otherwise operate any control on _any_ part of my ship. Thanks though.” 

Rose exchanged a look with her mother, merely to confirm with each other that the scene they were witnessing was indeed what they thought it was. Under some other circumstance – one, say, where she was fresh from a much needed shower, and feeling a possible (although at this juncture highly unlikely) afterglow – she might have felt slighted. She could still feel slighted. She wasn’t ruling out extreme irritation either. 

The Doctor’s jealousy, any kind of jealousy really, was not a concept Jack got, and he mistook it for something else. He took a vicious bite from the stolen chalupa. “Fine by me you ungrateful fucker. Want I should go back and un-rescue your ass?” 

“It’s one thing for you to pilot my ship in order to ‘rescue’ me, and quite another to _recalibrate_ her systems when I’m not here.”

“You used to have me do it all the time!”

“That was _before_. And I was present and--” 

“Oh. So you’re okay with a 3-way?”

“Always comes back to sex with you, doesn’t it? Typical.”

“You’re one to talk,” Jackie muttered.

He rounded on her. “That was different!” 

“Don’t see how.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t seem to recall you being in the room while it was going on.”

Rose groaned and tried desperately to shake that image from her mind. 

“Wait,” Jack said, eyes flicking from one to the other and back again. Rose put her face in her hands. “Wait wait wait. What’s this, now?”

“None of your business,” the Doctor snapped. 

Ah, Rose thought, there’s the irritation I’ve been expecting. She glared at him. Hard. “You’re acting like a right arse, you know that? You should be thanking your lucky stars you got people who love you enough to help you out, no matter what they have to do to do it.”

“Right. I’m sure you let me do all those things for altruistic Marvin Gaye reasons.” 

“All what things?” Jack said.

“Safe bet we won’t be doing those things again,” she shot back.

“Won’t need to.”

“Fine by me.”

“Good. That’s sorted then.”

“Hold on!” Jack cried. “You’re telling me Mister buy-me-a-drink-first-oops-sorry-changed-my-mind got down and dirty with our blushing Rose?” He tilted his head, eyeing the Doctor speculatively. “You _are_ a changed man.” 

The Doctor, still little pink in the cheeks, covered his embarrassment by rolling his eyes. “It’s not what you think. Definitely not what _you_ think.” 

Jack plopped himself in the captain’s chair and idly swiveled back and forth. “You know, I’m starting not to like this version of you at all.”

“Think we’re all in agreement there,” Rose said.

The Doctor sputtered for a second, clearly of the opinion he was the injured party. “You’re all ganging up on me! It’s not fair. I’ve been ill. I’ve been married-with-children, and drugged, and a good portion of my mind is still missing—“

“Not to mention your ship’s been seeing another man,” Jackie added. 

Jack’s mouth formed an “O” as he suddenly got it. 

A long silence passed. Rose kept her gaze steady on him, indignant glare fully engaged. Jackie had a seat on a bench, crossed her arms over her bosom, and likewise glared. Jack calmly finished the chalupa. After a few moments on this accusing scrutiny, the Doctor slumped against the console, like a pouting scarecrow. 

“Fine. _Thank-you._ Now that we’ve got that sorted—“ He shoved away from the instrument panels and pushed his body into a surly upright position. “We’re going to hang about in the vortex a while so you can catch me up to speed. I’m still a little fuzzy on the particulars. How the hell _did_ I end up married with children, working in Northern California in the research and development department of Deep Time?” 

***

 

Eugenie Bajul inserted another DVD into the computer. She couldn’t find anymore thumb drives. As it was, copying the contents of the JAR was going to take longer than they had -- about twelve years longer by her reckoning. “Is this really necessary? It’s not as if anyone here can make use of this. He’s the only one that’s been able to decrypt it.”

On the other side of the desk, Bobby Dexter was busy feeding files into a shredder. “Doesn’t mean someone won’t figure it out a century down the road. Just covering our asses. I mean, if we do get caught – and I’m not saying we will -- they won’t be able to add some kind of temporal paradox infringement to the list of crimes. That carries a hefty sentence if I recall.” 

“So does murder. Especially if the victim can regenerate and stand witness at the trial.”

“He won’t be able to regenerate, Eugie. Trust me on this.”

***

Fuck him and his need to know. 

The Doctor’s head shot round, eyes wide. _That’s right_ Rose thought back at him as loud as she could, _you mind-read me correctly. Fuck you_. 

“Rose—” he began.

“Nope. Not saying another word until I’ve had a shower. And you’d better make damned sure there’s plenty of hot water or I won’t be held responsible.” His eyes slid sideways and she heard him swallow hard.

“Don’t know about the rest of you,” Jackie said, “but I could murder a cup of tea.”  
Jack snagged another paper-wrapped food thing and offered to lead her to the galley. None of them looked back. 

It was in the shower that it all came crashing down, a hard slap in the face, like the terrible, humiliating surprise of a practical joke when you’re expecting a birthday party. 

Somewhere in a parallel universe, Mickey Smith was doing the “I told you so” dance. 

She cried and cried until the wad of pain in her heart melted into a kind of manageable goo. The hot water didn’t run out. The shower eased some of the soreness in her muscles, but she could still feel the fluttering twinges and tiny spasms that followed a bout of energetic sex, graffito writ in not-quite-pain, “the Doctor was here.” 

Patting herself dry with extra fluffy towels, she exfoliated, toned, moisturized, brushed her teeth, flossed, used mouthwash, and then sat at the pink vanity to take stock before applying her make-up. 

_All right. Here it is Rose Tyler. The facts._ He’d used her love and her body to help himself, like the most common of selfish human beings. The fact that he wasn’t human made it worse somehow like she was supposed to respect his motivations or excuse them because he was THE DOCTOR and therefore much more important in the universal scheme of things. Which, of course, he was. 

She started to cry again. 

She could have been anyone, _anyone_ that let him—

The tentative rap on the door made her cringe. She knew who it was. Let him think she was still in the shower. 

“Rose?” Of course he knew she wasn’t.

She wiped her face and swallowed the thickness in her throat. “Yeah?”

“Your mum’s made tea.”

“OK.” 

Silence. She waited. More silence. Deep breath. She picked up foundation and sponge— 

“Can I come in?” Damn. He was still there. 

“I’m not dressed.” 

“Yes, well, you know, technically—“ She tensed, daring him to finish that sentence. He didn’t. “Rose… please, let me come in.” 

“Since when do you need my permission? Your ship, innit?” 

A soft thud against the door. And another. Probably his forehead. After a moment, she heard the knob rattle then his muffled curses when the door refused to budge. The TARDIS was awaiting _her_ permission it seemed. With a sigh of irritation she rose, opened the door, and went back to the little chair at the vanity. 

He stood behind her, hands in his pockets, watching miserably as she angrily applied a generous layer of foundation over the splotchy evidence of her tears. She flicked a glance at him in the mirror. “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For which part?”

“All of it.”

 _But I don’t want you to be sorry for all of it_! “Yeah. Thanks for that. Tell Mum I’ll be out in a bit—”

Suddenly he was on his knees, taking hold of her hands trapping them in the cage of his fingers even as she tried to pull away. “Rose. Rose. Look at me, please.” 

“ _No_ ”. Her voice came out tiny. “I don’t, I don’t—“

“Please. I need you to look at me.” 

She took a deep breath, raised her eyes and then was caught.

“I am a bad bad Timelord.” She gave a soggy snort. He squeezed her hands and the makeup sponge squished in her fist. “Seriously. I really am. That’s not the way I would have wanted it, you understand?”

She really wanted to look away now. “Is this you saying you’ve wanted it?” 

He broke eye contact first. “Doesn’t matter. Because it’s not right, not fair to you. There’s a disparity between us – not just the age factor. And that makes it wrong in so many ways you can’t possibly imagine.”

She huffed out a sigh and jerked her hands from his grasp. “Sort of like me doing it with a chimp I suppose.”

“No! No, that’s not what I— just listen! Listen to me. It’s about power. In that I have it and you—“

“No. You listen, _Timelord_. Maybe it wasn’t sacred or holy or even“ – deep breath – “romantic, but it was _significant_. Why’re you trying to deny that?” 

Astonished, he said, “I’m not. The only reason I’m kneeling here at your feet in your room on my very own TARDIS is because you fucked the brain back into my head.”

Her eyes went wide and then she burst out laughing. “Yeah, how exactly did that work anyway?”

He blushed and grinned. “I’ll be happy to explain it, but first I need to know what happened that made it necessary.”

She had the sudden urge to play connect-the-dots with his freckles. “I’ll tell you if you kiss me.”

“Rose, come on—“

“I’m about to put a lot of stuff on my face,” she warned. His brows shot up in alarm, and then he took a resolute breath before leaning in to lock lips. She’d been expecting a quick kiss, just enough to seal the bargain, and had, in fact, prepared a counter move. So she was surprised when he gave a soft moan into her mouth, and then melted against her lips like warm chocolate. His hands were in her hair, and soon enough one left her head to roam elsewhere. It was a long dizzying kiss of breathless proportions, with tongues, and feeling up, and everything. When he pulled back, her lower lip was still between his teeth. 

“Ow,” she said, after he let go. He sat back on his heels, looked at her expectantly. 

“Oh,” she said, “right. Here’s what happened. We were larking about in the Vortex after the Abba concert—“

“Abba?” He looked forlorn. “Did I enjoy it?”

“’Course. People kept telling you to sit down, cos they couldn’t see—“

“Idiots. Don’t they know half the fun of Dancing Queen is dancing?”

“That’s what you said. Don’t you remember?”

“No. And _that_ is yet another reason I must find the evil bastards that did this to me and destroy them. What then?”

“Well, we’re singing Dancing Queen in the Vortex and all the sudden there’s this ‘ping’ right? And you said, ‘that’s odd’ and you went round the console flicking switches and pushing levers and twisting knobs, and then your eyes got real big and you yelled ‘Hey!’ and there was a fizzy sparking bit and you threw yourself across the console trying to reach it and—“

He put a finger to her lips, “Might be best if you show me.”

***

Bobby and Eugie barely had time to register the strange sound before the TARDIS was parking itself in the lab. Eugie lobbed the forcefield pod at the squat light on top and Bobby flicked the switch. The pod unfurled like an umbrella and a mosquito net of energy fell over the blue box. They waited breathless with glee. The door opened. The Doctor emerged—

“—and when I turned around they were all wearing eye patches—oich.” 

He ran into the force field with his nose, and shuffled back a step rubbing it. Crowding out behind him were three others: the girl, Rose, in a bright blue hoodie and artfully torn jeans, hair all bouncy, and mascara-ed to within an inch of her life; her mother, blowsy as ever; and a dark-haired blue eyed man in a tight t-shirt with No STDs emblazoned across the chest, and a rather large blaster in hand. 

The Doctor had changed into a blue-pin-striped suit and long brown overcoat. He was rocking on the toes of his red chucks, mouth quirked in annoyance as he pulled something out of his pocket it, twisted the end and aimed it at the net until there wasn’t one.

The pod fell with a plastic clatter to the floor and rolled under a table. 

“Honey,” the Doctor said looking at Eugenie. “I’m home.”

“Oh wow,” said the dark haired-blue-eyed man in the tight t-shirt, also looking at Eugenie, “an SSLJ M-4. God, I haven’t seen one you in ages.”

“What’s an SSLJ M-4 when it’s at home then?” the girl’s mother asked.

“Admin Exec Model 4, early fifty-first century if I’m not mistaken,” the Doctor said. 

“You’re not,” replied the dark-haired man, making some ominous adjustment to his blaster. 

“Also known as Short Skirt Long Jacket,” the Doctor added with a huge grin. 

Rose fell against him laughing. 

The dark haired man caught sight of Bobby and frowned. “Hey, don’t I —“

Bobby Dexter waggled his fingers in a greeting then sprinted for the door. 

“I’ll be right back!” Jack cried, giving chase. 

The woman stood, trying to look unthreatened but not _unthreatening_ , little scowl between her perfectly arched black brows. Her short hair was glossy dark, and her power suit (a knee length skirt and _short_ jacket) worn with a turquoise blue silk blouse were immaculately tailored. She looked terribly…efficient. The occasional dart of her eyes was the only thing that gave her nervousness away.

The Doctor cocked his head at her. “You have a name?”

“Yes,” she said. There was a moment when it became clear she wasn’t going to give it to him. 

“I hope it’s not Admin Exec SSLJ Model 4. That’s a bit of a mouthful. Should I call you darling, then? Sweetheart? The old ball and chain -- _Sandy_ \--“

“Eugenie.”

He barked a laugh. “That’s sooo…apt. Considering.” 

“Considering what?” Rose asked. “She’s like a clone, or a robot, right?” 

Eugenie shuddered delicately. Jackie, who’d been eyeing her in a kind of fascinated horror, said, “Got a serial number tattooed on your arse then, lovie?”

“I happen to be Gengineered, you ancient chavvy whore—“

“Whoa!” the Doctor cried, catching Jackie about the waist mid-launch at Eugenie’s face, and swinging her away. “All right, all right. Let’s all just – just Calm. Down!!” It was a bit like gator wrestling except the gator wore trainers that really _really_ hurt his shins. He lost his grip, made a scrabbling grab for her, had just managed to snag her by the back of her shirt when Eugenie took the opportunity to make a break for it. 

She got as far as the threshold before Rose tackled her to the ground. 

Jackie wrenched free with a lot of huffing and puffing. She smoothed her clothes down and her hair back in an effort to recover a semblance of what passed for dignity. Eugenie was not faring nearly as well in the dignity department. Knocked breathless, she found herself being dragged by the ankles across the floor. By the time Rose dropped her high-heeled feet at the Doctor’s own, the tailored skirt was up around her waist. He smiled tightly, squatting beside her. “Where is it then?”

“Where is what?” she snapped.

“The rest of my mind. The knowledge you took from me. Where are you storing it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He sighed. “Fine. Are there any donuts left?” She blinked, startled then irritated by this blatant attempt to throw her off guard. 

“How should I know?”

He glanced over his shoulder at his companions. “There’re usually donuts in the employee lounge. Miss Thang here tried to keep the healthy stuff around, but who wants fruit when you can have crullers?”

“You want a cruller? _Now_? ”

“What I want,” he began, reaching to tug the skirt back down over the exposed bits with the intimate familiarity of one who’s been intimate with the bits in question, “is to know how a genetically engineered human construct from the 51st century and a conman from who the hell knows when or where managed to pull me out of my TARDIS and trap me here.” He patted and smoothed the wool gabardine over her thighs. “I have theories. Theories that will go nicely with a donut and coffee.” He bounded suddenly to his feet and jerked her to hers by one arm, none-too-gently. She swung from that arm for a moment before the heels of her shoes found enough spiky purchase to keep her upright. And then before any of them could utter a word he was headed for the doors, looking for donuts or his mind, it didn’t seem to matter at that moment. Mother and daughter shared a look of bewildered amusement before his shout of, “You coming or not?” had them trotting after him.

The building was mostly empty, it being the middle of the night. The Doctor had darted into a room along the way to check security camera monitors. The night watchman appeared to be dozing peacefully in a chair at the lobby reception desk. 

“Le Roy never sleeps anywhere near the security cameras normally.” He gave Eugenie a hard little shake. “Did you drug him?” She rolled her eyes at the fact that he’d even needed to ask. “He could get sacked! Lose his pension! He’s up for retirement in eight months. Bought a boat to sail to Jamaica--”

“Oh, what do you care? Soon as you get what you’re after you’ll be gone in blink without another thought to Mr. Le Roy Spencer and his retirement plans--” 

“You’re wrong!” Rose said. “The Doctor cares about people. All kinds of people. He doesn’t just forget about them.”

“Right. What she said. Speaking of people, what have you done with the children?”

Eugenie frowned irritably. “What?” 

“The kids. Where did you get them? Where are you keeping them? Whose are they? Did you drug them too?” 

The rapid fire onslaught of questions had her shrinking back from him. “The- the two point fives?” Then she started to giggle. “Oh my god. You’re talking about the two point fives!” 

“The expression, I believe, is two point four, as in the average American family has two point four children. Of course that was in the sixties when— what?” The giggles grew louder and more breathless. “If you’ve done anything to those children I won’t answer for my actions—” He had her by the wrist now. His fingers were leaving imprints.

“Oh god,” she gasped, swiping at the tears of hilarity with her free hand. “If they were actual children I might take that threat seriously. I’m surprised at you Doctor. Actual children could never have been so convincing. Unless they were actually yours of course.” His eyes got huge and his eyebrows disappeared under his fringe. 

“They’re not,” he whispered.

“Oh, not in the traditional _biological_ sense of the word.” She smiled sweetly and leaned in to murmur softly in his ear. “They’re Malleables.”

He blinked at her a couple of times as if he hadn’t quite heard correctly. 

“What’s a malleable?” Rose asked, alarmed by his expression. 

Unwilling to answer her, he was also unable to make anything but eew sounds. His face wore an expression that screamed “oh my god I just ate shit!”

“A malleable is bit like a tulpa,” Eugie offered brightly. “Only much more affordable.”

“Um, yeah, that doesn’t tell me much.”

“It’s nothing like a tulpa!” the Doctor protested. “Arrgh! I kissed one of them on the head!”

“But what are they?”

“Yeah, Doctor,” Jackie said, intrigued to the point of avarice. “What’s so awful about ‘em?”

“Oh go on, Doctor, tell them what a Malleable is.”

“Just--shut the hell up, you!” He gave her a mighty shove as they rounded a corner.

She ran smack into her partner in crime. They actually banged heads. Jack’s blaster was firmly lodged between Dexter’s shoulder blades. 

“Hey,” Jack said, waving a cruller at them. He’d found the employee’s lounge it seemed. 

“If that’s the last one,” the Doctor said darkly, “they’ll never find your body.”

Jack swallowed what was in his mouth, and wordlessly handed over what was left of the cruller. 

***

 

“Gosh! Is that a Jungianspace-Acetycholine Retort?”

The Doctor pushed his specs up the bridge of his nose in order to see the object of his scientific wonder in all its glory. Said object was sat on a table behind a curving wall of plexiglass in a clean room. It was a fat cylindrical vase shape with thousands upon thousands of fiber optic cables sprouting from the top like wheatgrass on radiation. Some of the fiber optic cables were threaded into little pinholes in the table itself, and the rest waved about, happy antennae awaiting their turn to be in a little hole. Murky liquid, full of swirling colors, filled and coated the sides of the container in moiré patterns, like water on a petrol spill. Occasionally, stars flashed inside the liquid, crazy electro-chemical reactions that caused the colors to shift in a lazy fashion. 

Prodded by a jab from Jack’s weapon, Dexter answered, “Not exactly.”

“Justinian Afferent Receiver.”

“No.”

“Not Jefferson’s Afferentation Replicator?”

“Those’re rubbish. Wouldn’t have been much use in this case.”

“Too true, too true. So? What? A James-Lange Axon Reciprocator?”

“I wish.”

“Oh, this must be the Jacksonian Axon _Re-transmitter_ —“

Dexter caught his lower lip between his teeth. If his hands had been free he would have been wringing them. “No.” He offered an apologetic smile. “We were…unable to acquire one of those.”

The Doctor eyed him over his glasses. “So, you’re keeping the contents of _my_ brain in a generic brand JAR?” 

Dexter looked as if he’d like to tug his collar away from his sweating neck. He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably, squirming in his bonds. “I can assure you, it’s every bit as good as the Brain Onireology Transmissions and Temporal Lobe Envelopes.” 

“But I’m a Time Lord, you idiot! You can’t keep my mind in a cheap knock-off. You need all sorts of safety protocols. It’s very volatile in its unfettered state. Horribly, horribly dangerous!” 

“Yes, but, well, you see, we’ve been very careful to regulate the data stream in a carefully controlled feed—“

The Doctor thrust his hands into his hair and pulled hard, his eyes wild. “OH! MY! GOD!” The force of his outcry reverberated against the plexiglass, causing it to vibrate and tremble in a way it probably wasn’t supposed to. He whirled about in a frenzy of outrage. “You snatch me off my ship, take the mind right out of my head, put it in a Just Another Receptacle, and then set me to work deciphering the contents? That’s some bloody cheek!”

“Well, in all truth, we never expected to snag one of your kind,” Dexter said. “I mean, Eugie here didn’t even believe you were the real deal. Timelords. Just myths and legends, like, like—“

“Leprechauns,” Eugenie offered. 

The Doctor took a deep breath, the better to unleash another tirade, but Jack interrupted him. 

“In all fairness to Mr. Dexter, he’s probably the only person from the 51st who’d even recognize what you are. He made a quite a study of the myths, claimed to have located the area of space where once dwelled the ‘fabulous Lords of Time and Space.’ Pretty good scam while it lasted. If he hadn’t inadvertently set off a serious global causality situation—“

“That was not my fault! I was set up!” 

“Right. Whatever. As it was, we just barely avoided a major temporal meltdown. But before he could be brought to trial, Bobby Dexter mysteriously disappeared.” Jack flashed Eugenie a quick grin. “Figure Boris and Natasha here had no intention of residing in the 21st on a permanent basis, but they got…stranded? Somehow?”

Neither Dexter nor Eugenie inclined to elucidate on the matter. 

“Suffice it to say that whatever they used to snag you was meant to get them someone or something else – probably a researcher’s pod, or, if they were really unlucky, one of me – a Time Agent. Am I right?”

“Ideally, there wouldn’t have been anything left of _your_ mind.” Eugenie told Jack. “You would have been an empty shell in three minutes. We could easily have overwritten any security on an Agency pod.”

Jack scoffed. “Oh, yeah, because you’re just _that_ good. That must be why you got stuck in this backwater backtime with no way to any of the otherwhens.”

Dexter broke in. “We’ve been twelve miserable years building this institute, getting the funding, finding Twenty-firsters clever enough to do what we needed them to do, but not clever enough to figure anything out on their own—“

“You weren’t even trying to build a time machine were you?” the Doctor said. “That’s a rhetorical question by the way.”

“That technology isn’t capable of existing right now. And it’s not as if we’re immortal, you know. Deeptime is really just Snareware for the technology we needed. If the first test had gone as planned--“

“You wouldn’t have caught a leviathan instead of the anticipated cod.”

“Mmm, yes. That about sums it up. All of the sudden the entire complex was in turmoil.” Dexter threw the Doctor a look, part half-arsed apology, part accusation. “The stuff of your mind flooded every system. Everything we worked on was being overwritten. So we had to dump the whole lot into the JAR and, uh, process you _physically_ , as t’were. That’s when I figured out what -- _who_ it was we had. You understand it was too great an opportunity to pass up. Your knowledge, your ship, the entire mythic history made manifest and laid at our feet--” He could still feel the thrill of that discovery, a residual high shivering through him even now. He looked into the Doctor’s face as if he alone could understand the wonder of it, but the expression that met his gaze was so terribly alien that all Bobby Dexter could see in those eyes was himself, rolling forever in the icy cold of space. He swallowed hard. “We were going to let you go. We were, I swear. Once you’d finished transcribing the data.”

“I doubt that very much. If I had managed to finish, I’d’ve been in a vegetative state for the remainder of my years. And then I would have died. Permanently.” Rose gave a little anguished cry behind them. Dexter’s eyes darted to the side, a sheen of sweat on his upper lip. “I wouldn’t have been able to regenerate. I think you knew that. In fact, I think you know an awful lot of facts about a mythical race, Bobby. Why is that?” 

The Doctor put one arm on the back of Bobby's chair and leaned in close. “I can take whatever I want from your mind if I choose. You understand?”

Dexter shrunk back, shaking his head. But it wasn’t from a fear of the threat. When he opened his eyes again, he seemed almost regretful. “You can’t. Not in your current state.”

The Doctor drew in a sharp breath and straightened to his full height. “That’s as may be. But you’ve greatly underestimated me, Mr Dexter.” He spun on his heel and strode across the room, turning to face the assemblage with a sweep of his coat. He pointed at the pair of criminals from the future. “While you were plotting and scheming and keeping me stupid, _this_ \--” He pointed at his pinstriped crotch, “was actively striving to overthrow your evil plans.” 

“Oh my god,” Rose moaned, hiding her burning face in her hands. 

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Eugenie said. “You do not have a brain in your penis.” 

“Do you?” Jack hissed out the side of his mouth.

“I think Rose would agree there was a lot of active striving towards something—” Jackie slapped him on the back of the head. “All right. No. Not as such. What I do have,” he said, pressing rigid fingers into the area under his left collar bone. “Is a powerful little bundle of ganglia, very like a second brain. It allows me to consciously control my metabolism, blood chemistry, motor control – _relative time_ if needs be -- that sort of thing. When the Snareware hit I…downloaded, if you will, a rudimentary backup of my mind, and gave it a very specific trigger for uploading; one that I chose for the unlikelihood of its being detected.”

“Clever,” Eugenie said through her straight white teeth. “And here I thought your kind were just extraordinarily horny bastards.”

The Doctor reddened and cleared his throat. “Yes, well, point is, I’ve got backup systems for my backup systems. I am the last of my kind. I don’t really want to be but there you have it. And as such I happen to contain multitudes, and I’m not talking figuratively. I have a very _very_ long memory. It’s huge, mighty big, hard as diamonds, thick as corded steel— “ He stopped suddenly, still flushed but apparently for a different reason. “Er, where am I going with this metaphor now?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, “but I’d really like to buy your memory a drink sometime.”

“Me too,” Jackie piped in. Rose thwacked on her arm. “Well if it’s that big he ought to spread it around, is all I’m saying.”

“Mum!”

The Doctor shuddered all over and valiantly tried to recover the stirring momentum of his speech. “I – I think what I’m getting at is, there was never a possibility of you succeeding Mr Dexter. It’s too big for you—“ He held up a warning finger aimed at Jack, who obediently snapped his mouth shut. “What you have in there is a memorial to a dead culture – the span of an entire civilization from the beginning of our existence as a race of beings crawling up out of our own primordial ooze, and on and on through millennia, generations of individuals existing as memory acids. There’s nothing there that can help you or enrich you or even, sad to say, enlighten you. Whatever you hoped to recreate out of me can’t be recreated. There isn’t enough of _me_ to go around I’m afraid. It’s the same with my ship, poor old thing. A thousand years or more just to grow the shell.” He put his hands in his pockets and smiled. It was the smile of a man who’d lost nearly everything he’d loved, hated, regretted, celebrated, or took for granted. “If you think I was ever going to let you have even a tiny part of it, you’re mad.” 

Dexter looked at him, almost imploring. “But why should you exist as mere myth?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Look, it took me long enough to get used to the idea that I still existed at all, in any form. I can handle myth just fine, thank you very much.” 

“I’m sure you’ll continue to revel in it,” Eugenie said. “But I’d love to know what the hell were you doing all these weeks if you weren’t deciphering the codes embedded in the acids?”

“Sudoku. In fact that’s what you’ll find on all those discs you’ve been frantically burning while we’ve been talking here.” Eugenie gave a strangled cry. The Doctor laughed. “It’s got, oh, a few billion nine squares.”

***

 

While the Doctor did something mysterious to the JAR with his sonic screwdriver, Jack made a call to have the criminals removed to a place he declined to name. 

“I think there might be timeline issues,” he explained. “And, uh, you might want to get gone pretty quick.”

The Doctor accepted this without protest. He carried the receptacle into the TARDIS and popped back out again. Eugenie and Bobby were sat on the floor against the plexiglass of the clean room, in restraints awaiting pickup. The rest of them stood idly about, a trifle awkwardly, trying to figure out how to say their goodbyes. It was Jack made the first move of course, pulling the Doctor into a hug and kissing him on the lips. He stepped back, brushed his finger over the lips and said. “That’s a good mouth.”

“Thanks. I’m rather fond of it.” 

Rose came in under the Doctor’s arm and drew it around her shoulders. “Me too.” 

“Well, I’m not,” Jackie said as he threw his other arm around her. 

Jack grinned. “Will I see you again?” 

The Doctor smiled. “Definitely.” He lifted his hand from Jackie’s shoulder in a kind of wave. In it was the sonic screwdriver. “You just won’t remember any of _this_.”

There was a bright flash of light. He hustled the startled women into the TARDIS, closed the doors and immediately set about dematerialization over the rising noise of their protests. 

“What was that? What the hell did you do?”

“Doctor! How could you? You know what he’s been through, you can’t just—“

“I can. Just. Look, better me than a painful interrogation by whoever he’s working for.” Rose was seething and he spared her a gaze in the midst of pushing buttons and shifting levers. “Don’t worry. Pretty sure I got those other two as well. They won’t be mentioning my name anytime soon.”

“So. What? You’re just going to erase peoples memories whenever it suits you now? What about me? Us? You gonna take that out of my mind to save yourself a little embarrassment down the road?”

“What?” Jackie squeaked, looking from the Doctor to Rose, suddenly panicked. “Who’s erasing what now?”

The Doctor clicked his tongue. “Rose. Rose. Honestly.” He raised the sonic screwdriver and offered an apologetic quirk of his lips. “You won’t even remember I’ve done it.”

There was a flash of light.


End file.
